There was hardly a word spoken in the cab, for Mr. Kennedy was in pain.  When, however, they reached the door in Grosvenor Place, Phineas wanted to go, and leave his friend with the servants, but this the Cabinet Minister would not allow.  “Of course you must see my wife,” he said.  So they went up-stairs into the drawing-room, and then upon the stairs, by the lights of the house, Phineas could perceive that his companion’s face was bruised and black with dirt, and that his cravat was gone.

“I have been garrotted,” said the Cabinet Minister to his wife.

“What?”

“Simply that;—­or should have been, if he had not been there.  How he came there, God only knows.”

The wife’s anxiety, and then her gratitude, need hardly be described,—­nor the astonishment of the husband, which by no means decreased on reflection, at the opportune re-appearance in the nick of time of the man whom three minutes before the attack he had left in the act of going in the opposite direction.

“I had seen the men, and thought it best to run round by the corner of Grosvenor Square,” said Phineas.

“May God bless you,” said Lady Laura.

“Amen,” said the Cabinet Minister.

“I think he was born to be my friend,” said Lady Laura.

The Cabinet Minister said nothing more that night.  He was never given to much talking, and the little accident which had just occurred to him did not tend to make words easy to him.  But he pressed our hero’s hand, and Lady Laura said that of course Phineas would come to them on the morrow.  Phineas remarked that his first business must be to go to the police-office, but he promised that he would come down to Grosvenor Place immediately afterwards.  Then Lady Laura also pressed his hand, and looked—­; she looked, I think, as though she thought that Phineas would only have done right had he repeated the offence which he had committed under the waterfall of Loughlinter.

“Garrotted!” said Lord Chiltern, when Phineas told him the story before they went to bed that night.  He had been smoking, sipping brandy-and-water, and waiting for Finn’s return.  “Robert Kennedy garrotted!”

“The fellow was in the act of doing it.”

“And you stopped him?”

“Yes;—­I got there just in time.  Wasn’t it lucky?”

“You ought to be garrotted yourself.  I should have lent the man a hand had I been there.”

“How can you say anything so horrible?  But you are drinking too much, old fellow, and I shall lock the bottle up.”

“If there were no one in London drank more than I do, the wine merchants would have a bad time of it.  And so the new Cabinet Minister has been garrotted in the street.  Of course I’m sorry for poor Laura’s sake.”

“Luckily he’s not much the worse for it;—­only a little bruised.”

“I wonder whether it’s on the cards he should be improved by it;—­worse, except in the way of being strangled, he could not be.  However, as he’s my brother-in-law, I’m obliged to you for rescuing him.  Come, I’ll go to bed.  I must say, if he was to be garrotted I should like to have been there to see it.”  That was the manner in which Lord Chiltern received the tidings of the terrible accident which had occurred to his near relative.