The young man stepped ashore with cramped and stiff limbs.
“What is half-past eight, Father Charon?” he said, with a hoarse, happy laugh.
Hardly had the returned voyager uttered these irrelevant words when a voice of curious import came on his ears. He shuddered as though he had felt the impact of a knife upon his flesh.
“Luney, Luney!” cried the voice, “I have been looking for you for hours, all along the shore. You were not at the station, so I made sure you had drowned yourself. What a madman you are; where do you suppose you have been? As long as I live I will never bring you to Margate again.”
“Oh yes,” said the returned voyager, with a weary shiver, “I know that voice—that voice is as familiar to me as the stars of the night.”
XXVIII
William Jordan’s startling misconduct on this historic day was not lightly passed over by that distinguished circle of which Mr. James Dodson was the natural leader. They made rather a point of insisting that their accomplished friend should forego the society of the culprit for the future.
“As long as we thought he was a mere harmless lunatic, Jimmy,” said Mr. John Dobbs, “we didn’t so much mind your taking him up, although we all thought from the first that for a chap like you to do so was coming down a peg. But now that we find out that he is not a harmless lunatic at all, but a downright dangerous one, we think you owe it to yourself that you should give him the cold shoulder altogether.”
To which expression of well-meaning wisdom Mr. Dodson rejoined tactfully, “I dare say you may be perfectly right, John. I shall have to think it over.”
All the same in the inscrutable recesses of Mr. Dodson’s heart there was no clearly defined intention of acting upon this disinterested advice. Mr. James Dodson was preeminently a man of the world, “a two-and-two-makes-four” man, in his own phrase, yet a stealthy feeling had already taken root within him, which somehow forbade the philosopher to follow the dictates of pure reason with the implicit fidelity that was his wont. He had nothing to gain by association with such a person as William Jordan, Junior, for even his faculty of speaking Greek like a native, had by this time become a theme for derision among Mr. Dodson’s intimates; yet when the eminent worldling and philosopher came closely to scrutinize his own personal dealings with this very odd specimen of humanity, it began to appear that he was no longer his own master.