"THE DUMPLING WAS MAKING A DESPERATE DASH FOR LIBERTY."
The Dumpling had got clean away, perhaps to put the fuse to the mines of which he had spoken as laid and ready, and to spring upon a startled country the surprise of his great rebellion.
I heard his footsteps and the footsteps of his out-distanced, defeated pursuers die away in the distance, and then, creeping noiselessly out, I scaled the wall and made my way home to my own rooms and to bed. I had had more than enough of adventure for one night.
CHAPTER XXI.
THE KINDNESS—AND UNKINDNESS—OF KATE.
When I awoke next morning it was with a singular feeling of depression—the reaction, I told myself, from the excitement of the last few days. Life seemed flat and at loose ends. I was in love, with small prospect of bringing my suit to a successful issue. Nor, in the matter of the Dumpling, could I persuade myself that I had any reason for self-congratulation. I had heroically set out to trap and to catch a criminal, instead of which I had been made a prisoner myself.
That I was here in bed, and between the blankets, was due neither to my own skill nor to my own strength, for I had been hopelessly outwitted in the former quality, and ignominiously made to feel my own inferiority in the latter. That I was here at all, instead perhaps of lying strangled in a cellar, was due to the arrival of the police on the previous evening.
Had their appearance not cut short my discussion with the Dumpling, the issue of that discussion might have been disastrous to myself. The most difficult part of my task—to convince the Dumpling that I was sufficiently in sympathy with himself and with his projects, safely to be allowed at large—was all to come. In dealing with a madman, one never knows what sudden warp his cunning and his mania will take; and but for the interruption, it might have been my life, instead of the conversation, which was prematurely cut short.