The man seemed to draw a breath of relief.
“I was afraid you had done so,” he said. “You must keep my secret. You must not breathe it to a soul. I don’t know why I trusted you. It was foolish of me.”
Bart said nothing.
“You took me by surprise,” declared the strange doctor. “You were watching me there in the grove. Why were you watching me? Answer that question.”
“It happened quite by chance.”
“Did it? Then you were not spying upon me?”
“Of course not.”
“I thought perhaps you might have been. I have kept the great secret until the time comes to divulge it, which I shall do in a most sensational manner. I have not yet decided how it is to be, but I shall do something to rival the act of Samson when he pulled down the temple upon his enemies. I have enemies. You may not know it, but it is true. I have secret enemies, and they would rob me of my strength if they knew I possessed it. That is why I wish to keep it a secret until the time comes. Then I shall call them all out in a body and topple some massive building down upon them. That will obliterate them, and they will give me no more trouble.”
He was speaking in a quiet tone of voice, and any one observing him must have fancied he was simply chatting with Bart about ordinary matters.
More than ever was Hodge satisfied that the man was a dangerous lunatic. And he was all the more dangerous because he had craftily concealed from those who knew him best the fact of his derangement. They simply thought him “queer,” but it was not likely that any of them dreamed that his mind was actually unbalanced.