Then Holcombe shut the door on him, closing him out from their sight.  He placed his hands on a shoulder of each of the two men and jumped step by step down the stairs like a boy as they descended silently in front of him.  At the foot of the stairs Carroll turned and confronted him sternly, staring him in the face.  Meakim at one side eyed him curiously.

“Well?” said Carroll, with one hand upon Holcombe’s wrist.

Holcombe shook his hand free, laughing.  “Well,” he answered, “I persuaded him to make restitution.”

“You persuaded him!” exclaimed Carroll, impatiently.  “How?”

Holcombe’s eyes avoided those of the two inquisitors.  He drew a long breath, and then burst into a loud fit of hysterical laughter.  The two men surveyed him grimly.  “I argued with him, of course,” said Holcombe, gayly.  “That is my business, man; you forget that I am a District Attorney—­”

“We didn’t forget it,” said Carroll, fiercely.  “Did you?  What did you do?”

Holcombe backed away up the stairs shaking his head and laughing.  “I shall never tell you,” he said.  He pointed with his hand down the second flight of stairs.  “Meet me in the smoking-room,” he continued.  “I will be there in a minute, and we will have a banquet.  Ask the others to come.  I have something to do first.”

The two men turned reluctantly away, and continued on down the stairs without speaking and with their faces filled with doubt.  Holcombe ran first to Reese’s room and replaced the pistol in its holder.  He was trembling as he threw the thing from him, and had barely reached his own room and closed the door when a sudden faintness overcame him.  The weight he had laid on his nerves was gone and the laughter had departed from his face.  He stood looking back at what he had escaped as a man reprieved at the steps of the gallows turns his head to glance at the rope he has cheated.  Holcombe tossed the bundle of notes, upon the table and took an unsteady step across the room.  Then he turned suddenly and threw himself upon his knees and buried his face in the pillow.

The sun rose the next morning on a cool, beautiful day, and the Consul’s boat, with the American flag trailing from the stern, rose and fell on the bluest of blue waters as it carried Holcombe and his friends to the steamer’s side.

“We are going to miss you very much,” Mrs. Carroll said.  “I hope you won’t forget to send us word of yourself.”

Miss Terrill said nothing.  She was leaning over the side trailing her hand in the water, and watching it run between her slim pink fingers.  She raised her eyes to find Holcombe looking at her intently with a strange expression of wistfulness and pity, at which she smiled brightly back at him, and began to plan vivaciously with Captain Reese for a ride that same afternoon.

They separated over the steamer’s deck, and Meakim, for the hundredth time, and in the lack of conversation which comes at such moments, offered Holcombe a fresh cigar.