“Go away!” he said fiercely, “your hand burns me—it burns me, I say! How can you look at me or touch me? What have I done that you come here day by day to torment me? Is it not enough that _he_ leaves me no peace night or day?—that he brings me down to this cursed place, whether I will or no, but you must haunt me too? Ah, it is too much—it is too much, I say!”
She could not catch all these rapidly-uttered words, but she read the hopeless misery of his face.
“I do not wish to distress you, Conrad. Will you go home quietly now? You are not well; you should not be out here alone. Have you anybody there to take care of you?”
He laughed again, and flung his arms above his head with a wild gesture of despair.
“You say this to me—you! you! It only wanted this. My God, this is too much!”
He turned from her and sprang away in the darkness. She heard his steps as he dashed recklessly up the cliff path—so recklessly that she half expected to hear the sound of a slip and a fall—and then as he reached the summit and turned inland, they died away into silence.
Monica drew a long breath of relief when she found herself alone. There was something expressibly awful in talking alone to a madman in the dimness of the dying day, in hearing his wild words addressed to some phantom shadow seen only by his disordered vision. She shivered a little as she turned towards him. She could stay no longer in that lonely place.
She met Tom looking out for her on her return. He said something about her staying out too long in the darkness. She laid her hand upon his arm, and pacing up and down the dark avenue, she told him of her adventure with the madman.
“Tom, I am certain he ought to see a doctor. Will you not see if you can do something for him?”
She could not see the expression of Tom’s face. Had she been able to do so, she would have been startled. His voice was very cold as he answered:
“I am not a lunacy commissioner, Monica.”
“You are very hard, Tom. You saw him once before, why not again?”
“If he, or his friends for him, require medical advice, I suppose they are capable of sending for it,” he said, adding with sudden fierceness, as it seemed to her, “Monica, Conrad Fitzgerald, ill or well, is nothing to you. It is not fit you should waste a single thought upon that scoundrel again!”