The conversation having been conducted up to this point in undertones, the effect of this unexpected uproar was like an explosion.  The cries seemed to echo round the room and shake the very walls.  For a moment Jimmy stood paralysed, staring feebly; then there was a sudden deafening increase in the din.  Something living seemed to writhe and jump in his hand.  He dropped it incontinently, and found himself gazing in a stupefied way at a round, smoking hole in the carpet.  Such had been the effect of Gentleman Jack’s unforeseen outburst that he had quite forgotten that he held the revolver, and he had been unfortunate enough at this juncture to pull the trigger.

There was a sudden rush and a swirl of action.  Something hit Jimmy under the chin.  He staggered back, and when he had recovered himself found himself looking into the muzzle of the revolver which had nearly blown a hole in his foot a moment back.  The sardonic face of Gentleman Jack smiled grimly over the barrel.

“I told you the night wasn’t over yet!” he said.

The blow under the chin had temporarily dulled Jimmy’s mentality.  He stood, swallowing and endeavouring to pull himself together and to get rid of a feeling that his head was about to come off.  He backed to the desk and steadied himself against it.

As he did so, a voice from behind him spoke.

“Whassall this?”

He turned his head.  A curious procession was filing in through the open French window.  First came Mr. Crocker, still wearing his hideous mask; then a heavily bearded individual with round spectacles, who looked like an automobile coming through a haystack; then Ogden Ford, and finally a sturdy, determined-looking woman with glittering but poorly co-ordinated eyes, who held a large revolver in her unshaking right hand and looked the very embodiment of the modern female who will stand no nonsense.  It was part of the nightmare-like atmosphere which seemed to brood inexorably over this particular night that this person looked to Jimmy exactly like the parlour-maid who had come to him in this room in answer to the bell and who had sent his father to him.  Yet how could it be she?  Jimmy knew little of the habits of parlour-maids, but surely they did not wander about with revolvers in the small hours?

While he endeavoured feverishly to find reason in this chaos, the door opened and a motley crowd, roused from sleep by the cries, poured in.  Jimmy, turning his head back again to attend to this invasion, perceived Mrs. Pett, Ann, two or three of the geniuses, and Willie Partridge, in various stages of negligee and babbling questions.

The woman with the pistol, assuming instant and unquestioned domination of the assembly, snapped out an order.

“Shutatdoor!”

Somebody shut the door.

“Now, whassall this?” she said, turning to Gentleman Jack.

CHAPTER XXIII