me.  I made a clear breast of it to Gedge.  He believed the worst.  I don’t blame him.  I bought his silence for a thousand a year.  I made arrangements for payment through my bankers.  I went to Norway.  But I went alone.  I didn’t fish.  I put off the two men I was to join.  I spent over a month all by myself.  I don’t think I could tell you a thing about the place.  I walked and walked all day until I was exhausted, and got sleep that way.  I’m sure I was going mad.  I should have gone mad if it hadn’t been for the war.  I suppose I’m the only Englishman living or dead who whooped and danced with exultation when he heard of it.  I think my brain must have been a bit touched, for I laughed and cried and jumped about in a pine-wood with a week old newspaper in my hands.  I came home.  You know the rest.”

Yes, I knew the rest.  The woman he had left to drown had been ever before his eyes; the avenging Furies in pursuit.  This was the torture in his soul that had led him to many a mad challenge of Death, who always scorned his defiance.  Yes, I knew all that he could tell me.

But we went on talking.  There were a few points I wanted cleared up.  Why should he have kept up a correspondence with Gedge?

“I only wrote one foolish angry letter,” he replied.

And I told him how Sir Anthony had thrown it unread into the fire.  Gedge’s nocturnal waylaying of him in my front garden was another unsuccessful attempt to tighten the screw.  Like Randall and myself, he had no fear of Gedge.

Of Sir Anthony he could not speak.  He seemed to be crushed by the heroic achievement.  It was the only phase of our interview during which, by voice and manner and attitude, he appeared to me like a beaten man.  His own bravery at the reception had gone for naught.  He was overwhelmed by the hideous insolence of it.

“I shall never get that man’s voice out of my ears as long as I live,” he said hoarsely.

After a while he added:  “I wonder whether there is any rest or purification for me this side of the grave.”

I said tentatively, for we had never discussed matters of religion:  “If you believe in Christ, you must believe in the promise regarding the sins that be as scarlet.”

But he turned it aside.  “In the olden days, men like me turned monk and found salvation in fasting and penance.  The times in which we live have changed and we with them, my friend.  Nos mulamur in illis, as the tag goes.”

We went on talking—­or rather he talked and I listened.  Now and again he would help himself to a drink or a cigarette, and I marvelled at the clear assurance with which he performed the various little operations.  I, lying in bed, lost all sense of pain, almost of personality.  My little ailments, my little selfish love of Betty, my little humdrum life itself dwindled insignificant before the tragic intensity of this strange, curse-ridden being.

And all the tune we had not spoken of Betty—­except the Betty of long ago.  It was I, finally, who gave him the lead.