It was Hugh Stires.
CHAPTER X THE GAME
Harry Sanderson stared at the apparition with a strange feeling, like rising from the dead. There flashed into his mind the reflection he had seen once in the mirror above the mantel—the face on which fell the amber ray from the chapel window, shining through the figure of the unrepentant thief—the face that had seemed so like his own!
The likeness, however, was not so startling now. The aristocratic features were ravaged like a nicked blade. Dissipation, exposure, shame and unbridled passion had each set its separate seal upon the handsome countenance. Hugh's clothes were shabby-genteel and the old slinking grace of wearing them was gone. A thin beard covered his chin, and his shifty look, as he turned it first on Harry and then nervously over his shoulder, had in it a hunted dread, a dogging terror, constant and indefinable. From bad to worse had been a swift descent for Hugh Stires.
The wave of feeling ebbed. Harry drew the window-curtains, swung a shade before the light, and motioned to the chair.
"Sit down," he said.
Hugh looked his old friend in the face a moment, then his unsteady glance fell to the white carnation in his lapel as he said: "I suppose you wonder why I have come here."
Harry did not answer the implied question. His scrutiny was deliberate, critical and inquiring. "What have you been doing the last year?" he asked.