"Revenge is Mine; I Will Repay."
"Can't I have a light?" said Philip, with head screwed round to ascertain if the doctor were following him.
Some sense, whether of sight or hearing he knew not, warned him of movement near at hand, an impalpable effort, a physical tension as of a man laboring under extreme but repressed excitement.
He paid little heed to it. All the surroundings in this weird dwelling were so greatly at variance with his anticipations that he partly expected to find further surprises.
Dr. Williams did not answer. Philip advanced a halting foot, a hesitating hand groping for a door.
Instantly a stout rope fell over his shoulders, a noose was tightly drawn, and he was jerked violently to the stone floor of the passage. He fell prone on his face, hurting his nose and mouth. The shock jarred him greatly, but his hands, if not his arms, were free, and, with the instinct of self-preservation that replaces all other sensations in moments of extreme peril, he strove valiantly to rise.
But he was grasped by the neck with brutal force, and some one knelt on his back.
"Philip Anson," hissed a man's voice, "do you remember Jocky Mason?"
So he had fallen into a trap, cunningly prepared by what fiendish combination of fact and artifice he had yet to learn. Jocky Mason, the skulking criminal of Johnson's Mews. Was he in that man's power?
Under such conditions a man thinks quickly. Philip's first ordered thought was one of relief. He had fallen into the clutches of an English brigand. Money would settle this difficulty, if all other means failed.