Sir Peter held up an offensively pacifying hand. “I know that,” he said; “you needn’t tell me that.”
He raised his voice a little to increase his already excessive accentuations. “I said properly used.”
A yawn took the Lord Chancellor unawares and he caught it dexterously with his hand. Then he saw Douglas hastily pull at his little blond moustache to conceal a smile,—grinning ape! What was there to smile at? The man had been smiling all the evening.
Up to something?
“Now let me tell you,” said Sir Peter, “let me tell you the proper way to use a revolver. You whip it out and instantly let fly at the ground. You should never let anyone see a revolver ever before they hear it—see? You let fly at the ground first off, and the concussion stuns them. It doesn’t stun you. You expect it, they don’t. See? There you are—five shots left, master of the situation.”
“I think, Sir Peter, I’ll bid you good-night,” said the Lord Chancellor, allowing his eye to rest for one covetous moment on the decanter, and struggling with the devil of pride.
Sir Peter made a gesture of extreme friendliness from his chair, expressive of the Lord Chancellor’s freedom to do whatever he pleased at Shonts. “I may perhaps tell you a little story that happened once in Morocco.”
“My eyes won’t keep open any longer,” said Captain Douglas suddenly, with a whirl of his knuckles into his sockets, and stood up.
Lord Woodenhouse stood up too.
“You see,” said Sir Peter, standing also but sticking to his subject and his hearer. “This was when I was younger than I am now, you must understand, and I wasn’t married. Just mooching about a bit, between business and pleasure. Under such circumstances one goes into parts of a foreign town where one wouldn’t go if one was older and wiser....”