Tessin and Major Shackleton looked suddenly towards Wyley in recognition of the accuracy of his guess. Scrope simply wiped the perspiration from his forehead and waited.
"But how does that—forgetfulness, shall we say?—persuade you to the fear that you played the coward?" asked Wyley.
"Well," replied Knightley, and his voice sank to a whisper, "I played the coward afterwards at Mequinez. At the first it used to amuse me to wonder what happened after I opened the door and before I was captured outside Tangier; later it only puzzled me, and in the end it began to frighten me. You see, I could not tell; it was all a blank to me, as it is now; and a man overdriven—well, he nurses sickly fancies. No need to say what mine were until the day I played the coward in Mequinez. They set me to build
