“Ambrose, you are a black villain,” said my uncle.

“We all have our own feelings, Sir Charles; and you will permit me to say that a serving-man may resent an injury as much as a gentleman, though the redress of the duel is denied to him.  But I am telling you frankly, at Lord Avon’s request, all that I thought and did upon that night, and I shall continue to do so, even if I am not fortunate enough to win your approval.

“When Lord Avon had left him, the captain remained for some time in a kneeling attitude, with his face sunk upon a chair.  Then he rose, and paced slowly up and down the room, his chin sunk upon his breast.  Every now and then he would pluck at his hair, or shake his clenched hands in the air; and I saw the moisture glisten upon his brow.  For a time I lost sight of him, and I heard him opening drawer after drawer, as though he were in search of something.  Then he stood over by his dressing-table again, with his back turned to me.  His head was thrown a little back, and he had both hands up to the collar of his shirt, as though he were striving to undo it.  And then there was a gush as if a ewer had been upset, and down he sank upon the ground, with his head in the corner, twisted round at so strange an angle to his shoulders that one glimpse of it told me that my man was slipping swiftly from the clutch in which I had fancied that I held him.  I slid my panel, and was in the room in an instant.  His eyelids still quivered, and it seemed to me, as my gaze met his glazing eyes, that I could read both recognition and surprise in them.  I laid my knife upon the floor, and I stretched myself out beside him, that I might whisper in his ear one or two little things of which I wished to remind him; but even as I did so, he gave a gasp and was gone.

“It is singular that I, who had never feared him in life, should be frightened at him now, and yet when I looked at him, and saw that all was motionless save the creeping stain upon the carpet, I was seized with a sudden foolish spasm of terror, and, catching up my knife, I fled swiftly and silently back to my own room, closing the panels behind me.  It was only when I had reached it that I found that in my mad haste I had carried away, not the hunting-knife which I had taken with me, but the bloody razor which had dropped from the dead man’s hand.  This I concealed where no one has ever discovered it; but my fears would not allow me to go back for the other, as I might perhaps have done, had I foreseen how terribly its presence might tell against my master.  And that, Lady Avon and gentlemen, is an exact and honest account of how Captain Barrington came by his end.”

“And how was it,” asked my uncle, angrily, “that you have allowed an innocent man to be persecuted all these years, when a word from you might have saved him?”