“How is it, Martin, if you can tell me, that after two years on the other side of the world you turn up here within a week or so of my coming? There has been no job going for all that time, but you arrive as soon as the job, your old one, is open.”

Martin scratched his head and seemed genuinely puzzled.

“Dunno, sir. It’s queer to me, too, but here I am. I didn’t know there was a job open till a few minutes ago.”

“I take it, then, you had no particular reason for getting back here to-day?”

The man glanced at him with a sort of awkward interest. He hesitated a little, as though about to put forward something hardly credible even to himself, and finally jerked out an answer.

“I can’t say much more than that things kind of hinted at it, sir, and kept on hinting till they made me uncomfortable. There wasn’t any special reason I know of. I was doing well enough, trading up the Irawadi, when something began to get at me to come back, and it kept on till I started for Rangoon. It stayed with me, hustling me along, and I felt I didn’t even want to go and look up my sister; but I did, and the same feeling lifted me out of their farm in Alberta. Up till about two months ago I believed I wasn’t wanted here; then I knew I was wanted for something.” He frowned to himself at this, as though he hardly expected to be either understood or taken seriously. “Maybe I was a fool to come,” he added, “but in a way it wasn’t left to me to decide. It’s the first time I ever struck anything like that. It was like jungle-fever without the fever.”

“You simply had to come,” said Derrick quickly.

“I’m not given to such feelings, but, since you say it, yes, I reckon I had to come.”

Derrick had a faint thrill of triumph. Here again the mysterious factor was at work, the thing to which he himself was yielding so completely. It had spread its potent and invisible filaments half round the world, penetrated the Burmese jungle, and haled this shifty-eyed man back to the tiny Sussex village from which he had fled under the shadow of a great crime as yet undetected. How could these filaments have been set in motion if not at the demand of the dead Millicent whose quiet features now surveyed this recaptured wanderer? What would the thing that had been Millicent arrange next? At the thought of this Derrick’s pulse gave a throb of excitement. Then he looked Martin full in the face.

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