This was the manner in which, years ago, he had visited the girl whose love had ended by wearying him so fatally. By what means he had forgotten the intervening years she did not know, but Olivia recognized at once that it was not she of whom he was in search. The knowledge restored in a moment all her courage. If, as she supposed, fear of discovery had turned his brain, his was a madness with which she felt she could cope. After only one moment’s hesitation, she snatched up one of the candles, and unlocking the door she had secured, passed through the passage into the adjoining room.
“Mr. Brander!” said she, in a voice which scarcely trembled.
She had to repeat her words three or four times before he moved from the other door. At last he turned very slowly, and Olivia, raising the candle high, looked curiously, and not wholly without fear, into his face.
His eyes were closed; his breathing was heavy. He was asleep!
There flashed through her mind the remembrance of what the Vicar of Rishton had said about somnambulism, and the strange instances of it which had occurred in his family. It was clear to her that the excitement occasioned by Ned Mitchell’s obstinate determination had preyed upon the mind of the murderer, and led him at last to perform in sleep an action which had been an habitual one with him eleven years before.
In spite of the horror of this weird discovery, Olivia’s fears disappeared at once. She thought she might, without waking him, persuade him to go back as he had come. If he did wake, she knew he would not hurt her. She began in a low, intentionally monotonous voice.
“I think you had better go back to-night. It is getting very late; it is almost daylight.”
As before, she had to repeat her words before he grasped the sense of them.
Then he repeated in a whisper, and as if there were something soothing in the sound of her voice—
“Go back. Yes, go back.”