Then, when from the cessation of sound all appeared to be over, Hubbard made a fresh appeal. He took the painters arm.
"Now let's have this out," he said. "No good letting a thing get way on when a few plain words will stop it. A perfectly ordinary thing's happened. Simple parachute accident. No mystery about it whatever. The mystery only begins when _you_ come in carrying your damned candles and dropping jars and coming in here to tidy up instead of going outside to see what's happened. That's where the answer begins to be a lemon, my son. Listen to me. Whether you heard that crash or whether you didn't, at any rate you know all about it _now_. Then why can't you be just decently upset like the rest of us and have done with it?"
"Decently upset?" The words seemed to strike him. "Have I been behaving any other way?"
"You were behaving damnably indecently when you came up out of the orlop there--and that was _before_ you were told a word of all this, remember."
At last Esdaile saw the point. His behavior _had_ been extraordinary for whole minutes before the situation had been explained to him. One would have thought that during those minutes he had been deliberately trying to find out how much we knew about something or other before committing himself. When next he spoke it was almost apologetically.
"I see," he said quietly at last. "Yes, you're perfectly right. That was certainly the proper way to take it--just be decently upset. I see now. I must have looked a perfect zany.... Now look here: I want to tell you both all about it, but the trouble is that I can't just at this moment. At present it's somebody else's affair, not mine at all. Must get that cleared up first. I'm not perfectly sure of my ground either; you'll see by and by. But as regards the accident--well, that's the whole point at present. I mean anybody would say it _was_ an accident, wouldn't they? It _looked_ like one, I mean? It would never occur to anybody who saw it that----"
But here he broke off abruptly as his wife appeared in the doorway.
Perhaps at this point I had better tell you who "I" am who write this, and also how our little circle came to choose me for the task.
As a minor actor in these events you may set me down as a working journalist. Among other things I am one of the sub-editors of the _Daily Circus_. But that is not the whole of my life. I am also a novelist of sorts. And one of my reasons for sticking to journalism when I could manage at a pinch to do without it is that in this way I escape the doom of having to produce two novels a year whether I have anything to write about or not.