“It must indeed,” I replied.  “To my thinking blindness is one of the worst ills that can happen to a man.  It must be particularly hard to one who has led such a vigorous life as your uncle has done.”

I could almost have declared that she shuddered at my words.  Did she know more about her uncle and his past life than she liked to think about?  I remembered one or two expressions he had let fall in his excitement when he had been talking to me, and how I had commented upon them as being strange words to come from the lips of a missionary.  I had often wondered whether the story he had told me about their life in China, and Hayle’s connection with it, had been a true one.  The tenaciousness with which a Chinaman clings to the religion of his forefathers is proverbial, and I could not remember having ever heard that a Mandarin, or an official of high rank, had been converted to the Christian Faith.  Even if he had, it struck me as being highly improbable that he would have been the possessor of such princely treasure, and even supposing that to be true, that he would, at his death, leave it to such a man as Kitwater.  No, I fancied if we could only get at the truth of the story, we should find that it was a good deal more picturesque, not to use a harsher term, than we imagined.  For a moment I had almost been tempted to believe that the stones were Hayle’s property, and that these two men were conducting their crusade with the intention of robbing him of them.  Yet, on maturer reflection, this did not fit in.  There was the fact that they had certainly been mutilated as they described, and also their hatred of Hayle to be weighed in one balance, while Hayle’s manifest fear of them could be set in the other.

“If I am not mistaken that is your step, Mr. Fairfax,” said the blind man, stopping suddenly in his walk, and turning his sightless face in my direction.  “It’s wonderful how the loss of one’s sight sharpens one’s ears.  I suppose you met Margaret on the road.”

“I met Miss Kitwater in the churchyard,” I replied.

“A very good meeting-place,” he chuckled sardonically.  “It’s where most of us meet each other sooner or later.  Upon my word, I think the dead are luckier than the living.  In any case they are more fortunate than poor devils like Codd and myself.  But I am keeping you standing, won’t you sit down somewhere and tell me your news?  I have been almost counting the minutes for your arrival.  I know you would not be here to-day unless you had something important to communicate to me.  You have found Hayle?”

He asked the question with feverish eagerness, as if he hoped within a few hours to be clutching at the other’s throat.  I could see that his niece noticed it too, and that she recoiled a little from him in consequence.  I thereupon set to work and told them of all that had happened since I had last seen them, described my lucky meeting with Hayle at Charing Cross, my chase after him across London, the trick he had played me at Foxwell’s Hotel, and my consequent fruitless journey to Southampton.