“Guest,” said Stratton. “There, our plans are made. They are for ourselves alone I trust Guest, but not yet with this.”
He threw open the inner door, and unfastened the outer, which was drawn from his hand, and the man regarding whom they had been planning, looking intent and strange, strode into the room.
“James Barron!”
“Yes; I have business with you, sir,” he said, in quite his old tone. “Mr Malcolm Stratton, I believe?”
Chapter Forty Seven.
Flashing back to Life.
Brettison leaped from his chair, and Stratton literally staggered back against a glass case so violently that a figure upon it toppled over and fell with a crash, as if emblematic of another downfall of all hope.
For it seemed incredible. Little more than an hour before they had left this man apparently a helpless imbecile, unable to concentrate his mental faculties save upon one point, and only at certain times upon that, at all others hopelessly blank. While now the vacuity had apparently departed, his face looked eager and animated, and the helpless log had turned into a dangerous enemy, whose fresh coming upon the scene completely upset all calculations, and the question staring them in the face was how to act next.