"Shot through the head!" he fairly shrieked, as Borkins came quietly into the room, and stopped short at the sound of his master's voice. "I tell you it's impossible—impossible! It wasn't my shot, Mr. Headland—it couldn't have been!"
CHAPTER XV
A STARTLING DISCLOSURE
Cleek took a sudden step forward.
"What's that? What's that?" he rapped out, sharply. "Your shot, Sir Nigel? This is something I haven't heard of before, and it's likely to cause trouble. Explain, please!"
But Merriton was past explaining anything just then. For he had bowed his head in his hands and was sobbing in great, heart-wrung sobs with Doctor Bartholomew's arms about him, sobs that told of the nerve-strain which gave them birth, that told of the tenseness under which he had lived these last weeks. And now the thread had snapped, and all the broken, jangling nerves of the man had been loosed and torn his control to atoms.
The doctor shook him gently, but with firm fingers.
"Don't be a fool, boy—don't be a fool!" he said over and over again, as he waved the other away, and, taking out a little phial from his waistcoat pocket, dropped a dose from it into a wine-glass and forced it between the man's lips. "Don't make an ass of yourself, Nigel. The shot you fired was nothing—the mere whim of a man, whose brain had been fired by champagne and who wasn't therefore altogether responsible for his actions."
He whipped round suddenly upon Cleek, his faded eyes, with their fringe of almost white lashes, flashing like points of light from the seamed and wrinkled frame of his face.