purpose not to do more than wing them; there's my bullet in the door to say so, whereas theirs fairly whistled past my head on its way through that upstairs window. They're a most desperate gang of sportsmen, I assure you.""There's certainly something to be said for keeping a revolver," observed Uvo, eyeing the brace now lying on the cast-iron chimneypiece.
"Do you mean to say you haven't got one?" cried Colonel Cheffins.
"I do. I wouldn't keep one even out in Egypt. I hate the beastly things," said Uvo Delavoye.
"But why?"
"Oh, I don't know. There's something so uncanny about them. They lie so snug in your pocket, and you needn't even take them out to send yourself to Kingdom Come!"
"Why yourself, Mr. Delavoye?"
"You never know. You might go mad with the beastly thing about you."
"God bless my soul!" cried the colonel, with cocked eyebrows. "You might go mad while you're shaving, and cut yourself too deep, for that matter!"
"Or when you're waiting for a train, or looking out of a window!" I put in, to laugh Uvo out of the morbid vein which I understood in him but others might easily misconstrue. I could see the two young pupils exchanging glances as I spoke.
"No," he replied, laughing in his turn, to my relief; "none of those ways would come as easy, and they'd all hurt more. However, to be quite serious, I must own it isn't the time or place for these little prejudices against the only cure for the present epidemic. And yet for my part I'd always rather trust to one of my Soudanese weapons, with which you couldn't have an accident if you tried."
Over the way, his own rooms were freely hung with murderous trophies acquired in the back-blocks of the Nile; but I felt more and more that Uvo Delavoye was wilfully misrepresenting himself to these three strangers; and the best I could hope was that a certain dash of sardonic gaiety might lead them to suppose that it was all his chaff.
"Well," said the colonel, "if those are your views I only hope you haven't many "valuables" in the house."
"On the contrary, colonel, everything we've got over there is a few sizes too big for its place, and our plate-chest simply wouldn't go into the strong-room of the local bank. So where do you think we keep it?"
"I've no idea."
"In the bathroom!" cried Uvo Delavoye, with the shock of laughter which was the refreshing finish of some of his moodiest fits. But you had to know him to appreciate his subtle shades, especially to separate the tangled threads of grim fun and gay earnest, and I feared that the gallant little veteran was beginning to regard him as a harmless lunatic. A shake of his bald head was all his comment on the statement that moved Delavoye himself to sudden mirth. And on the whole I was thankful when the return of a man-servant with a nervous 

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