A stooping shadow, with a cap—blood-red in the dying light—on its head, and a face twisted and mocking.
But Sir Stephen was looking into the embers and seeing long years of laughter and song therein.
Oh, that stooping shadow! How stealthily it advanced.
Confusion to memory! Con——
An arm raised swiftly, and as swiftly descending.
Confusion——!
What followed? What followed?
A sudden, terrible pain, a suffocating sense of agony, a blinding rush of memories, of fear, of terror; and then a figure lurched forward, slipping sideways from the chair across the hearth, overturning a half-filled bowl of punch in its fall.
But Marcel Trouet stood cursing volubly in hot anger and dismay, for the features, upturned to his, were not those of Morice Conyers after all.
*****