Mr. Francis made a very slight movement in his chair, more of a tremor than a voluntary motion.
"Terrible, terrible!" he said. "What awful fate is it that dogs poor Harry?"
Geoffrey paused with mouth half open, a little wreath of smoke curling from the corner of it.
"In what other way has an awful fate dogged Harry?" he asked.
"Those three accidents he had last spring," he said. "How strange they were! They quite unnerved me."
"He was thinking of the ice house," said Geoffrey to himself with absolute certainty. "That was a mistake." Then, aloud. "They were not so very serious," he said.
"No, but uncomfortable. And then to-day!"
"Yesterday, you mean," said Geoffrey, trying to trap him.
"True, yesterday. How exact you are, my dear fellow! I had forgotten that it was, as the Irish say, to-morrow already. But how awful, how awful! That was what my strange premonition meant."
"It is odd that your premonition should have lasted all day," said Geoffrey, "when the danger was over by half past ten this morning."
For half a second Mr. Francis's face altered. The perturbed, anxious look which he had worn throughout the interview gave place, though but for a moment, to a trouble of a different type. Annoyance, you would have said, became more poignant than his anxiety.
"Yes; the whole feeling I had was unaccountable," he said. "But poor Harry! What an awful moment for the dear lad! But how could a cartridge have been in the gun? What frightful carelessness on Kimber's part! He can not have cleaned it after Harry used it last."
Again Geoffrey paused with his mouth slightly open. Mr. Francis, he considered, was on dangerous ground.
"That was in February," he said; "eight months ago. I can not imagine, somehow, the cartridge being there all this time."
"He was shooting in Scotland, was he not?" asked Mr. Francis.
"Yes; but a man would not carry a loaded gun in the parcel rack," said Geoffrey. "It is more usual for a gun to be taken to bits, and put in its case when one goes by train. Besides, as a matter of fact, Harry didn't take that gun to Scotland. There are other circumstances as well which lead me, at any rate, to a different conclusion--a different way of accounting for the accident," he corrected himself.