little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old
bureau--for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was
hung with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of books.
But as it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes
played with on the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf
was a tin with three or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer
went up and down that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma
he went first towards the neat little rifle athwart the blotting-pad
and then towards the neat little red label

".22 LONG."

The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.

Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun,
being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and there
were several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only
by a lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst's butler
opened the door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew,
he says, what had happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst's
household had guessed something of what was going on in Filmer's mind.

All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held
a man should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests
for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact--though
to conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible--that
Banghurst had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled
by the deceased. The public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed
"like a party that has been ducking a welsher," and there wasn't a soul
in the train to London, it seems, who hadn't known all along that flying