“Naturally.”
Once more the dull eyes were lit by that strange flare of stupefied agony. “At about twelve o’clock Sunday morning, I guess—or half-past eleven—I don’t know—sometime late that morning. George Dallas telephoned me. I was still half asleep.”
“What did you do?”
“Do? I don’t know what I did. It knocked me cold.”
Mr. Lambert suddenly thrust his beaming countenance into the stolid mask before him. “However cold it might have knocked you, Mr. Farwell, don’t you remember that within three quarters of an hour of the time that you received this news you locked yourself in the library and tried to blow your brains out?”
“Yes,” said Elliot Farwell, “I remember that.”
“You didn’t succeed because your friend Richard Burgoyne had previously emptied the pistol?”
“Correct.”
“And your Filipino boy, looking for you to announce lunch, noticed you through the window and set up the alarm, didn’t he?”
“So I understand.”