That morning Harry returned from Yokestone, and I walked a mile to meet him. He was near as excited as I over Joshua’s coming. He knew all about him, of course. We had no secrets from one another.
“What does he look like?” he said. “I’ve never seen an acquitted murderer.”
Joshua had shaved the gallows. He was not the rose, but he had lived near it.
“I can’t say he looks like everybody else,” I said, “because he doesn’t. But his nose is in the middle of his face.”
By-and-by we fell to our long-postponed discussion of the great adventure and its moral.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Harry, “that perhaps after all we’ll tell Sant.”
“O, you may snigger!” he said. “But supposing anything were to happen to us.”
“Why, what’s going to happen to us?”
“I don’t know. One can never tell.” He spoke quite sombrely. “It wouldn’t be right, would it, to carry that secret to the grave, especially——”
“Especially what?”