22 LONG."
The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.
Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun,
being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and there
were several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only
by a lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst's butler
opened the door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew,
he says, what had happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst's
household had guessed something of what was going on in Filmer's mind.
All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held
a man should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests
for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact--though
to conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible--that
Banghurst had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled
by the deceased. The public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed
"like a party that has been ducking a welsher," and there wasn't a soul
in the train to London, it seems, who hadn't known all along that flying
was a quite impossible thing for man. "But he might have tried it,"
said many, "after carrying the thing so far.
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