A heel that struck Lanyard’s shin earned Victor a shaking so thoroughgoing that he felt the teeth rattle in his jaws.  When it was suspended, he was breathless but thoughtful, and offered no objection to being searched.  Lanyard relieved him of a revolver and a dirk, then with a push sent Victor reeling to the table, where he stood panting, quivering, and glaring murder, while his captor put the dagger away and examined the firearm.

“Wicked thing,” he commented—­“loaded, too.  Really, monsieur le prince should be more careful.  One of these fine days, if you don’t stop playing with such weapons, one of these will go off right in your hand—­and the next high-light in your history will be when the judge says:  ’And may the Lord have mercy on your soul!’”

Victor confided his sentiments to a handkerchief with which he was mopping his face.  Lanyard sat down and wagged a reproving head.

“Didn’t catch,” he said; “perhaps it’s just as well, though; sounded like bad words.  Hope I’m mistaken, of course:  princes ought to set impressionable plebeians a better pattern.”

He cocked a critical eye.  “You’re a sight, if you don’t mind my saying so—­look as if the sky had caved in on you.  May one ask what happened?  Did it stub its toe and fall?”

Victor suspended operations with the handkerchief to bend upon his tormentor a louring, distrustful stare.  His head was still heavy, hot, and painful, his mental processes thick with lees of coma; but now he began to appreciate, what naturally seemed apparent, that Lanyard must be unacquainted with the cause of his injuries.

A searching look round the room confirmed him in this error.  The canvas lay where Lanyard had dropped it on entering, not in the spot where Victor remembered seeing it last, but where conceivably an unheeded kick might have sent it in the course of his struggle with Sofia.  She must have forgotten it, then, when she fled from what she probably thought was murder, and what might well have been.

He was much too sore and shaken to be subtle; and the general trend of his conjectures was perfectly legible to Lanyard, who without delay set himself to conjure away any lingering suspicion of his guilelessness.

“Not squiffy, are you, by any chance?” he enquired with the kindliest interest.  “You look as if you’d wound up a spree by picking a fight with a bobby.  Your cheek’s cut and all (shall we say, in deference to the well-known prejudices of the dear B.P.?) ensanguined.  Sit down and pull yourself together before you try to explain to what I owe this honour—­and so forth.”

He got up, clapped a hand on Prince Victor’s shoulder, and steered him into an easy chair.

“Anything more I can do to put you at your ease?  Would a brandy and soda help, do you think?”

The suggestion was acceptable:  Victor signified as much with an ungracious mumble.  Lanyard fetched glasses, a decanter, a siphon-bottle, and supplied his guest with a liberal hand before helping himself.