"You are prepared to swear to that?" insisted the other earnestly.
Colonel Harris was silent. For the first time since the beginning of this long interview he felt as if all the blood in his body was receding back to his heart causing it to beat so wildly that he thought it was about to choke him. The colour fled from his cheeks and the cigar dropped from between nerveless fingers. Swift as lightning a recollection came back to him—a vision of Luke entering the sitting-room of the Langham Hotel with his coat on and his hat and stick in the left hand.
But he would not give in even now—not on such paltry surmises. Any number of men he knew carried sticks that contained weapons of self-defence. He himself possessed a very murderous-looking swordstick which he had once bought in Paris. He fought down this oncoming attack of weakness, and blamed himself severely for it too. It savoured of disloyalty to Louisa and to Luke. He stooped and picked his cigar up and looked his brother-in-law boldly in the face.
"I wouldn't," he said, "swear either way, whether Luke had his stick with him last night or not. I know that stick, of course. I have got one very like it myself."
"So have I," rejoined Sir Thomas with his placid smile.
"And if that's one of the proofs on which you are going to accuse my future son-in-law of having committed a murder, then all I can say is, Tom, that you and I are seeing the last of one another to-day."
But Sir Thomas took this threat, as he had taken Colonel Harris's undisguised expressions of contempt, with perfect equanimity.
"If," he said quietly, "I did accuse Luke de Mountford or any other man of murder on such paltry grounds as that, Will, you would be perfectly justified in turning your back on me, if for no other reason than that I should then be an incompetent ass."
"Well, what more is there then?"
"Only this, Will. That the stick which you have so often seen in Luke de Mountford's hand, was found this morning inside the railings of Green Park; it bears unmistakable signs of the use to which it was put last night."