“Yes,” said the young man, “I know. Though I can recollect nothing at all—distinctly. Some incidents seem to be coming back to me. I have just a faint idea of two persons—a man and a woman. They were well-dressed and lived in a big old house. And—and they made me do something. Ah! I—I can’t recall it, only—only I know that the suggestion horrified me!” And he gave vent to a strange cry and his eyes glared with terror at the recollection. “Ah! the—the brutes—they forced me to—to do something—to—”
“To do what?” asked the girl, taking his hand softly and looking into his pale, drawn face.
“It is all a strange misty kind of recollection,” he declared, staring stonily in front of him. “I can see them—yes! I can see both of them—the woman—she—yes!—she held my hand while—she guided my hand when I did it!”
“Did what?” asked Elma in a slow, calm voice, as though trying to soothe him.
“I—I—I can’t recollect! Only—only he died!”
“Died! Who died?” gasped the old rector, who at the mention of the man and the woman at once wondered again whether Gordon Gray and Freda Crisp were in any way implicated. “You surely did not commit—murder!”
The young man seated in his chair sat for a few seconds, silent and staring.
“Murder! I—yes, I saw him! I would recognise him. Murder, perhaps—oh, perhaps I—I killed him! That woman made me do it!”
The rector and the pretty daughter of Purcell Sandys exchanged glances. Roddy was no doubt still under the influence of some terrible, baneful drug. Was his mind wandering, or was there some grain of truth in those misty, horrifying recollections?
“I’m thirsty,” he said a moment later; “very thirsty.”