Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an empty

decanter. He departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps

five minutes.



The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals

Filmer's face could be seen by the people on the easternmost

of the stands erected for spectators, against the window pane

peering out, and then it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished

shouting behind the grand stand, and presently the butler appeared

going pavilionward with a tray.



The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant

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

was a quite impossible thing for man. "But he might have tried it,"

said many, "after carrying the thing so far."



In the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke

down and went on like a man of clay. I have been told he wept,

which must have made an imposing scene, and he certainly said

Filmer had ruined his life, and offered and sold the whole apparatus

to MacAndrew for half-a-crown. "I've been thinking--" said MacAndrew



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