Long before he reached London, the drunken tramp, whom William supposed that he had killed, sat up. The car had never touched him. He had fallen in the road and had been slightly stunned. He rubbed his aged and disreputable head and grumbled to himself that this was what came of those sanguinary motors. Then he walked home, kicked his wife, and slept the sleep of the just.
The price that William Penarden was to pay for his cowardice was heavy enough. He was never to know that he had not even touched the man. Coincidence was already busy to convince him that he had killed that man, and to keep the terror of it fresh in his mind for the remaining two years of his life.
He came back from London by train on Sunday afternoon. He told Dolling that he was ill, and that he did not feel up to driving the car. Dolling could fetch it back from the garage on Monday. Dolling looked remarkably serious. He did not know if his master had heard of it, but a terrible thing had happened not three miles away from them. A man had been found dead in the road on Saturday night, and it was supposed that he had been knocked down by a motor-car. It was not the London road; it was just where—
William Penarden stopped him abruptly and savagely. It was all true, then, and not the dream that he had hoped to find it.
Yes, it was true enough, but it was another man and another car. The hoary reprobate who had been dazzled by the head-lights of Penarden's car, and had stunned himself in his fall, was now no worse than he usually was after his usual Saturday night.
For many weeks Penarden carefully avoided the newspapers. He was afraid of what he would find there. After that came a feeling of security, but never a moment's peace. That brilliant white hair in the moonlight wove itself into the fabric of his dreams. That black figure lurched ever before his car, till Penarden had a nervous breakdown and gave up motoring. When he got a little better, the chief question in his mind was how long he could stand it, how long it would be before his mind gave way and in his ravings he let loose his secret. Morose, nervous, ill, he saw no one. For a long time he travelled. Change of scene was an opiate. It put the day of madness a little further off.
The poor man did his best. The political career was now definitely given up. Lady Quyne spoke with a sigh to the more intimate part of her circle of her son's incurable idleness. On his return to England he had yielded to archæology; it was a subject which had always interested him, and he looked to it now to take his mind off. He journeyed from one cathedral city to another, asking erudite questions, making rubbings of brasses, and always haunted.
In the course of his wanderings in quest of the quaint he stopped at a provincial town, the normal serenity of which was in a state of temporary interruption owing to some reliability trials of motors being held in its neighbourhood. Penarden drove to the hotel which the railway porter impressed upon him was the only one likely to have accommodation for such as himself, and asked for a room. The clerk announced mournfully that "only No. 54 was unoccupied, and—well—before offering it to the gentleman he had better see the manager."
That official saw the class of man he was dealing with, and regretted deeply that he had no other room. But the reliability trials were on, and his resources were strained to the uttermost. It was all that he had to offer, and it was on the top floor of an annexe, the decoration of which was not yet completed. The painters' step-ladders and planks still lingered in the corridor. The view from the window was obstructed by a mean building scarcely eight feet away. True, the mean building had been condemned and was to come down; and the decorations would be finished and the workmen would be out in a fortnight; but in the meantime—