Page:The Middle of Things - Fletcher (1922).djvu/227

 hitherto pale, had flushed a little, and his eyes had grown bright; he looked as if he had suddenly seen a friend's face in a hostile crowd. But Mr. Millington-Bywater, who had been bending over his papers, suddenly looked up with another question, and Hyde again turned his attention to him.

"All that you really know of this matter," asked Mr. Millington-Bywater, "is that you chanced to turn up Lonsdale Passage, saw a man lying on the pavement and a ring close by, and that, being literally starving and desperate, you snatched up that ring and ran away as fast as you could?"

"Yes—that is all," asserted Hyde. "Except that I had met a man, as I have already told you, at the end of the passage by which I entered."

"You did not even know whether this man lying on the pavement was alive or dead?"

"I thought he might be drunk," replied Hyde. "But after I had snatched up the ring I never thought at all until I had run some distance. I was afraid of being followed."

"Now why were you afraid of being followed?"

"I was famishing!" answered Hyde. "I knew I could get something, some money, on that ring, in the morning, and I wanted to stick to it. I was afraid that the man whom I met as I ran out of the passage, whom I now know to have been Mr. Viner, might follow me and make me give up the ring. And the ring meant food."

Mr. Millington-Bywater let this answer sink into the prevalent atmosphere and suddenly turned to another matter. The knife which had been found in Hyde's possession was lying with certain other ex-