Something in Bartine’s manner that was not in his words—­I hardly knew what it was—­prompted me to ask: 

“What is your view of the matter—­of the justice of it?”

“My view of it,” he flamed out, bringing his clenched hand down upon the table as if he had been in a public house dicing with blackguards—­“my view of it is that it was a characteristically dastardly assassination by that damned traitor, Washington, and his ragamuffin rebels!”

For some minutes nothing was said:  Bartine was recovering his temper, and I waited.  Then I said: 

“Was that all?”

“No—­there was something else.  A few weeks after my great-grandfather’s arrest his watch was found lying on the porch at the front door of his dwelling.  It was wrapped in a sheet of letter paper bearing the name of Rupert Bartine, his only son, my grandfather.  I am wearing that watch.”

Bartine paused.  His usually restless black eyes were staring fixedly into the grate, a point of red light in each, reflected from the glowing coals.  He seemed to have forgotten me.  A sudden threshing of the branches of a tree outside one of the windows, and almost at the same instant a rattle of rain against the glass, recalled him to a sense of his surroundings.  A storm had risen, heralded by a single gust of wind, and in a few moments the steady plash of the water on the pavement was distinctly heard.  I hardly know why I relate this incident; it seemed somehow to have a certain significance and relevancy which I am unable now to discern.  It at least added an element of seriousness, almost solemnity.  Bartine resumed: 

“I have a singular feeling toward this watch—­a kind of affection for it; I like to have it about me, though partly from its weight, and partly for a reason I shall now explain, I seldom carry it.  The reason is this:  Every evening when I have it with me I feel an unaccountable desire to open and consult it, even if I can think of no reason for wishing to know the time.  But if I yield to it, the moment my eyes rest upon the dial I am filled with a mysterious apprehension—­a sense of imminent calamity.  And this is the more insupportable the nearer it is to eleven o’clock—­by this watch, no matter what the actual hour may be.  After the hands have registered eleven the desire to look is gone; I am entirely indifferent.  Then I can consult the thing as often as I like, with no more emotion than you feel in looking at your own.  Naturally I have trained myself not to look at that watch in the evening before eleven; nothing could induce me.  Your insistence this evening upset me a trifle.  I felt very much as I suppose an opium-eater might feel if his yearning for his special and particular kind of hell were re-enforced by opportunity and advice.

“Now that is my story, and I have told it in the interest of your trumpery science; but if on any evening hereafter you observe me wearing this damnable watch, and you have the thoughtfulness to ask me the hour, I shall beg leave to put you to the inconvenience of being knocked down.”