"I have got such a strange fancy in my head, I cannot rest."
"What is your fancy?" said Lord Hainault. "Stay; may I make a guess at it?"
"You would never dream what it is. It is too mad."
"I will guess," said Lord Hainault. "Your fancy is this:—You believe that Charles Ravenshoe is alive, and you have come up to London to take your chance of finding him in the streets."
"But, good God!" said William, "how have you found this out? I have never told it even to my own sweetheart."
"Because," said Lord Hainault, laying his hand on his shoulder, "I and John Marston have exactly the same fancy. That is why."
And Charles so close to them all the time. Creeping every day across the park to see the coachman and his son. Every day getting more hopeless. All energy gone. Wit enough left to see that he was living on the charity of the cornet. There were some splinters in his arm which would not come away, and kept him restless. He never slept now. He hesitated when he was spoken to. Any sudden noise made him start and look wild. I will not go on with the symptoms. Things were much worse with him than we have ever seen them before. He, poor lad, began to wonder whether it would come to him to die in a hospital or——
Those cursed bridges! Why did they build such things? Who built them? The devil. To tempt ruined, desperate men, with ten thousand fiends gnawing and sawing in their deltoid muscles, night and day. Suppose he had to cross one of these by night, would he ever get to the other side? Or would angels from heaven come down and hold him back?
The cornet and his mother had a conversation about him. Bawled the cornet into the ear-trumpet:
"My fellow Simpson is very bad, mother. He is getting low and nervous, and I don't like the looks of him."