"I don't understand you," I returned sharply, wondering whether he, too, like the railway-porter, thought that my brother was a fugitive from justice. "No offence, sir, but your friend seems to need looking after. He is either mad or dying. His eyes burned like live coals, and his face was as white as this snow here. I called out 'A rough night, sir!' but he glided on, looking neither to right nor left, and taking no notice of me." These words increased my misgivings. I thanked the constable and, declining his proffered services, rushed on in the direction indicated by him. A line of footprints in the snow served to guide me, and following their course, I presently found myself in a street whose semi-detached villas were fronted with quiet unpretentious gardens separated from the pavement by stone balustrades. There he was! Half-way down the street, standing beneath the light of a gas-lamp, was a cloaked man apparently taking a survey of a house facing the lamp, while shaking the snow from himself. I hurried forward to greet him, my feet making no sound on the soft snow. [Pg 10] [Pg 10] "George!" I cried eagerly and breathlessly when within a few paces of him. "George!" The figure turned to meet, but not to greet me. It was my brother's face I saw, but so haggard and disfigured by lines of pain as to be scarcely recognisable. His eyes frightened me as they gleamed in the lamplight; so glassy, so unnatural was their stare. With dread at my heart I tried to clasp his hand, but he waved me back with a gesture suggestive of surprise, despair, terror, shame, grief—any or all of these might have prompted the singular motion of his arm. If I had come upon him in the very act of murder, he could not have shown greater agitation. The fingers of his left hand relaxed their grip, and the valise they were holding dropped silently upon the snow. His action said more plainly than words: "Go back! go back! There is that happening of which you must know nothing." To my mind there could be but one cause of his emotion, a cause as awful to me as to him, and it burst from my lips in a hoarse cry. "Good heavens, George! Surely—surely Daphne isn't dead?" There was no reply. The laxity of his limbs and his reclining attitude against the iron column showed
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