will.'

'Do you mean to say you actually think he's shut up in a madhouse at this
moment?' demanded the attorney; his little pink eyes opened quite round,
and his lank cheeks and tall forehead flushed, at the rush of wild ideas
that whirred round him, like a covey of birds at the startling
suggestion.

The butler nodded gloomily. Larkin continued to stare on him in silence,
with his round eyes, for some seconds after.

'In a _mad_-house! Pooh, pooh! incredible! Pooh! impossible--_quite_
impossible. Did either Miss Lake or the captain use the word mad-house?'

'Well, no.'

Or any other word--lunatic asylum, or a--bedlam, or--or _any_ other word
meaning the same thing?'

'Well, I can't say, Sir, as I remember; but I rayther think not. I only
know for certain, I took it so; and I do believe as how Mr. Mark Wylder
is confined in a mad-house, and the captain knows all about it, and won't
do nothing to get him out.'

'H'm--very odd--very strange; but it is only from the general tenor of
what passed, by a sort of guess work, you have arrived at that
conclusion?'

Larcom assented.