“There!” cried Mrs. Smythe, greatly affected by his pathetic expression of countenance, “you’re all right now, sir.  How worn-out you must have been, to sleep so!”

“Do you always go to sleep with such alarming suddenness?” asked Mr. Dibble.

“When I have to go anywhere, I make it a rule to go at once:—­similarly, when going to sleep,” was the answer.  “Excuse me, however, for keeping you waiting, Mr. Dibble.  We’ve had quite a rain, sir.”

His hair, collar, and shoulders being very wet from the water which had been poured upon him during his slumber, Mr. Bumstead, in his present newly-awake frame of mind, believed that a hard shower had taken place, and thereupon turned moody.

“We’ve had quite a rain, sir, since I saw you last,” he repeated, gloomily, “and I am freshly reminded of my irreparable loss.”

“Such an open, spring-like character!” apostrophized the lawyer, staring reflectively into the grate.

“Always open when it rained, and closing with a spring,” said Mr. Bumstead, in soft abstraction lost.

“Who closed with a spring?” queried the elder man, irascibly.

“The umbrella,” sobbed John Bumstead.

“I was speaking of your nephew, sir!” was Mr. DIBBLE’S impatient explanation.

Mr. Bumstead stared at him sorrowfully for a moment, and then requested Mrs. Smythe to step to a cupboard in the next room and immediately pour him out a bottle of soda-water which she should find there.

“Won’t you try some?” he asked the lawyer, rising limply to his feet when the beverage was brought, and drinking it with considerable noise.

“No, thank you,” returned Mr. Dibble.

“As you please, then,” said the organist, resignedly.  “Only, if you have a headache don’t blame me. (Mr. and Mrs. Smythe, you may place a few cloves where I can get them, and retire.) What you have told me, Mr. Dibble, concerning the breaking of the engagement between your ward and my nephew, relieves my mind of a load.  As a right-thinking man, I can no longer suspect you of having killed Edwin DROOD.”

“Suspect me?” screamed the aged lawyer, almost leaping into the air.

“Calm yourself,” observed Mr. Bumstead, quietly, the while he ate a sedative clove.  “I say that I can not longer suspect you.  I can not think that a person of your age would wantonly destroy a human life merely to obtain an umbrella.”

Absolutely purple in the face, Mr. Dibble snatched his hat from a chair just as the Ritualistic organist was about to sit upon it, and was on the point of hurrying wrathfully from the room, when the entrance of Gospeler Simpson arrested him.

Noting his agitation, Mr. Bumstead instantly resolved to clear him from suspicion in the new-comer’s mind also.