“It is very early in the night for a burglar to be out.”
“He took advantage of the mist. He must have thought that there was no one in the room. I had turned out the light and was resting on the bed. I was half asleep, but he knocked a brush off the dressing-table as he was getting through the window and that woke me up. I caught a good glimpse of him and I fired. He dropped at once, and I thought I had hit him, but when I looked out of the window I saw him disappear in the mist. What an awful pity I didn’t get him.”
“How did you happen to be lying down with a revolver beside you?” asked Crewe.
“I often take it to bed with me. That is the result of the life at the front. And to-night I had a kind of presentiment that I should need it.”
It occurred to Crewe that the young man had been subject to hallucinations during his illness. This habit of sleeping with a revolver under his pillow seemed to indicate that his cure was still far from complete. Was the burglar a phantom of a sick mind?
He went over to the window for the purpose of looking out but his attention was arrested by a stain on the outside sill.
“You did not miss him altogether,” he said to Marsland. “Look here.”
Marsland touched the stain and held a blood-stained finger up to the light for his own inspection.