"It is his ghost," said Colonel Tempest to himself, clutching the railing, and looking back at the receding figure with an access of shuddering horror.
Another figure passed, a heavy man in an ulster.
"He is being followed," thought Colonel Tempest. "It is Swayne, and he is following him."
He rushed panting after the second figure, and overtook it at a meeting of the ways.
"Swayne!" he gasped; "for mercy's sake, Swayne, don't----"
A benevolent elderly face turned and peered at him in the twilight, and Colonel Tempest remembered that Swayne was dead.
"My name is Smith," said the man, and after waiting a moment passed on.
In a flash of memory Colonel Tempest saw Swayne's huddled figure crouching in the disordered bed, and the check trousers over a chair, and the candle on the window-sill bent double by the heat. That had been the manner of Swayne's departure. How had he come to forget he was dead, and that John was laid up at Overleigh?
"I am going mad," he said to himself. "That will be the end. I shall go mad and tell everything."
The new idea haunted him. He could not shake it off. There was nothing in the wide world to turn to for a change of thought. If he fell asleep at night he was waked by the sound of his own voice, to find himself sitting up in bed talking loudly of he knew not what. Once he heard himself call Swayne's and John's names aloud into the listening darkness, and broke into a cold sweat at the thought that he might have been heard in the next room. Perhaps the other lodger, the young man with the red hair, cramming for the army, knew everything by this time. Perhaps the lodging-house people had been listening at the door, and would give him in charge in the morning. Did he not at that very moment hear furtive steps and whispering on the landing? He rushed out to see the thin tabby cat, the walking funeral of the beetles and mice of the establishment, slip noiselessly downstairs, and he returned to his room shivering from head to foot, to toss and shudder until the morning, and then furtively eye the landlady and her daughter in curl-papers.
More days passed. Colonel Tempest had had doubts at first, but gradually he became convinced that the people in the house knew. He was sure of it by the look in their faces if he passed them on the stairs. It was merely a question of time. They were waiting to make certain before they informed against him. Perhaps they had written to John. There was no news of John, except a rumour in the _World_ that he was to stand at the coming general election.