He stood still in the road. It was his own road. There was that hole to fill in before morning; meanwhile the sweet night air was sweeter far than we had left it hours ago; and the little new suburban houses surpassed all pleasures and palaces, behind their kindly lamps, with the clean stars watching over them and us.
"I don't want you think the worse of me," said Delavoye, slipping his arm through mine as he led me on: "but at this particular moment I should somehow think less of myself if I didn't tell you, after all we've been through together, that I was really quite severely tempted to take that lace and those diamonds!"
I knew it.
"Well," I said, with the due deliberation of my normal Northern self, "you'd have had a sort of right to them. But that's nothing! Why, man, I was as near as a toucher to laying yon butler dead at our feet!"
"Then we're all three in the same boat, Gillon."
"Which three?"
It was my turn to stand still, outside his house. And now there was excitement enough in his dark face to console me for all mine.
"You, and I, and poor old Sir Christopher."
"Poor old hypocrite! Didn't I hear that his wife died a while ago?"
"Only last year. That makes it sound worse. But in reality it's an excuse, because of course he would fall a victim all the more easily."