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174 dangerous ones—that one's quite safe in the hands of an experienced slugger, as you would be with the skilful man in any line. I never thought of it that way before. He almost made it into an argument for leaving the trained artists loose on the streets, for the safety of the public, instead of turning the business over to boys only half educated."

"What do you think about the man yourself?" Constance persisted.

"The apprentice who practiced on me?"

She waited, watching his eyes. "I was hardly in a condition, Miss Sherrill, to appreciate anything about the man at all. Why do you ask?"

"Because—" She hesitated an instant, "if you were attacked to be killed, it meant that you must have been attacked as the son of—Mr. Corvet. Then that meant—at least it implied, that Mr. Corvet was killed, that he did not go away. You see that, of course."

"Were you the only one who thought that? Or did some one speak to you about it?"

"No one did; I spoke to father. He thought—"

"Yes."

"Well, if Mr. Corvet was murdered—I'm following what father thought, you understand—it involved something a good deal worse perhaps than anything that could have been involved if he had only gone away. The facts we had made it certain that—if what had happened to him was death at the hands of another—he must have foreseen that death and, seeking no protection for himself . . . It implied, that he preferred to die rather than to ask protection—that there was something whose concealment he thought mattered even more to him than life. It—it might have meant that