After tea Mr. Crawford showed no sign of going out. He drew an easy-chair to the window, and sat down at the right-hand side of the embrasure, so as to command a view of the head of the island across which he had seen the man pass the evening before.
He heard Layard's knock and his voice below-stairs, but still he did not stir. From the place where he sat, any man coming along the tow-path at a walking pace would be in view a minute or a minute and a half before passing out of sight behind Boland's Ait. Crawford did not remove his eyes from that tow-path for any thirty consecutive seconds.
"I knew him at once," he whispered; "I knew him the minute I saw him. I knew his build, his figure, his walk, the way he swings his hands--ay, his face, far off as he was--ay, his face, his accursed vengeful face."
He leaned forward. He judged, by the dying of the light and the shrouded rose-tint on the chimneys and upper walls of the houses in view, that it was growing near the hour at which the solitary man had appeared on the tow-path last evening.
"I wonder, if he saw me, would he recognise me? He thinks I am not in this country. He is not on the look-out for me. I am much changed since I saw him last." He passed his hand over his close-shaven face. "I had a beard and moustache then, and taking them off makes a great difference in a man's appearance--puts him almost beyond recognition. Then I have grown stouter--much stouter. I daresay my voice would betray me; and then there is that St. Vitus's dance in my eyelids. That is an awful drawback. I am horribly handicapped; it isn't a fair race. And the worst of that jumping of my eyelids is that it always comes on me when I am most excited and least want it, and, moreover, when I am mostly unconscious of it until the excitement is over. Confound it! I am heavily handicapped."
He rested his elbow on the arm of the chair, and dropped his chin into his palm, keeping his eyes all the while fixed on that section of the tow-path visible beyond the head of the island.
"I," he went on in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible to himself, "was on the look-out for him when I recognised him. I knew he lived in Camberwell, and that Camberwell was in the neighbourhood; and when I knew that this tow-path goes to that place, I had a presentiment he would come along that tow-path into my view. It might be called a superstition, I know, but I had the feeling, and it came true. He did come along that tow-path--he the man of all others on this earth I dread. But where did he delay? Where did he linger? Where did he hide himself? Layard said there was no place but in the canal, and I can see that the fence is too high for any man to scale without the aid of a ladder."
He rose and stood at the window, to command a better view of the scene.
"It seems unnatural, monstrous, that I should fear this Philip Ray more than Mellor. If I ought to be afraid of any one, it is Mellor; and yet I stand in no dread of him, because, no doubt----"
He paused with his mouth open. He was staring at the tow-path.