“When the man opened the door he saw three things:  one was the dead python, lying where he had left it; the second was a live python, its comrade apparently, slowly crawling round it; the third a crushed, bloody heap in the middle of the floor.

“He himself remembered nothing more until, weeks afterwards, he opened his eyes in a darkened, unfamiliar place, but the native servant, before he fled screaming from the house, saw his master fling himself upon the living serpent and grasp it with his hands, and when, later on, others burst into the room and caught him staggering in their arms, they found the second python with its head torn off.

“That is the incident that changed the character of my man—­if it be changed,” concluded Jephson.  “He told it me one night as we sat on the deck of the steamer, returning from Bombay.  He did not spare himself.  He told me the story, much as I have told it to you, but in an even, monotonous tone, free from emotion of any kind.  I asked him, when he had finished, how he could bear to recall it.

“‘Recall it!’ he replied, with a slight accent of surprise; ’it is always with me.’”

CHAPTER VIII

One day we spoke of crime and criminals.  We had discussed the possibility of a novel without a villain, but had decided that it would be uninteresting.

“It is a terribly sad reflection,” remarked MacShaughnassy, musingly; “but what a desperately dull place this earth would be if it were not for our friends the bad people.  Do you know,” he continued, “when I hear of folks going about the world trying to reform everybody and make them good, I get positively nervous.  Once do away with sin, and literature will become a thing of the past.  Without the criminal classes we authors would starve.”

“I shouldn’t worry,” replied Jephson, drily; “one half mankind has been ‘reforming’ the other half pretty steadily ever since the Creation, yet there appears to be a fairly appreciable amount of human nature left in it, notwithstanding.  Suppressing sin is much the same sort of task that suppressing a volcano would be—­plugging one vent merely opens another.  Evil will last our time.”

“I cannot take your optimistic view of the case,” answered MacShaughnassy.  “It seems to me that crime—­at all events, interesting crime—­is being slowly driven out of our existence.  Pirates and highwaymen have been practically abolished.  Dear old ‘Smuggler Bill’ has melted down his cutlass into a pint-can with a false bottom.  The pressgang that was always so ready to rescue our hero from his approaching marriage has been disbanded.  There’s not a lugger fit for the purposes of abduction left upon the coast.  Men settle their ’affairs of honour’ in the law courts, and return home wounded only in the pocket.  Assaults on unprotected females are confined to the slums, where heroes do not dwell, and are avenged by the nearest magistrate.  Your