I thought I had never seen him so Mephistopheles-like.  A sinister smile parted his lips, showing his small white teeth gleaming under his gray mustache, and he regarded me with a look of cynical amusement, in which there was perhaps a slight touch of contempt.

“You are a young man, Mr. Bacon,” he observed, gently, “and, like most young men, and a great many old men, you make false deductions.  Killing is not always murder.  If it were, we should consign our conquerors to everlasting infamy, instead of crowning them with laurels and erecting statues to their memory.  I am no murderer, Mr. Bacon.  At the same time I do not cherish illusions.  Unpremeditated murder is by no means the worst of crimes.  Taking a life is only anticipating the inevitable; and of all murderers, Nature is the greatest and the cruellest.  I have—­if I could only tell you—­make you see what I have seen—­Even now, O God! though half a century has run its course—­”

Here Mr. Fortescue’s voice failed him; he turned deadly pale, and his countenance took an expression of the keenest anguish.  But the signs of emotion passed away as quickly as they had appeared.  Another moment and he had fully regained his composure, and he added, in his usual self-possessed manner: 

“All this must seem very strange to you, Mr. Bacon.  I suppose you consider me somewhat of a mystery.”

“Not somewhat, but very much.”

Mr. Fortescue smiled (he never laughed) and reflected a moment.

“I am thinking,” he said, “how strangely things come about, and, so to speak, hang together.  The greatest of all mysteries is fate.  If that horse had not run away with you, these rascals would almost certainly have made away with me; and the incident of to-day is one of the consequences of that which I mentioned at our first interview.”

“When we had that good run from Latton.  I remember it very well.  You said you had been hunted yourself.”

“Yes.”

“How was it, Mr. Fortescue?”

“Ah!  Thereby hangs a tale.”

“Tell it me, Mr. Fortescue,” I said, eagerly.

“And a very long tale.”

“So much the better; it is sure to be interesting.”

“Ah, yes, I dare say you would find it interesting.  My life has been stirring and stormy enough, in all conscience—­except for the ten years I spent in heaven,” said Mr. Fortescue, in a voice and with a look of intense sadness.

“Ten years in heaven!” I exclaimed, as much astonished as I had just been horrified.  Was the man mad, after all, or did he speak in paradoxes?  “Ten years in heaven!”

Mr. Fortescue smiled again, and then it occurred to me that his ten years of heaven might have some connection with the veiled portrait and the shrine in his room up-stairs.