he exigencies of society, should care to spend
its evenings carrying on a laboured and childish conversation with a room
full of abnormally uninteresting people."

"That is precisely what I cannot understand," MacShaughnassy agreed.

"Nor I, either," said Jephson. "But I was thinking of something very
different altogether. Suppose a man died with the dearest wish of his
heart unfulfilled, do you believe that his spirit might have power to
return to earth and complete the interrupted work?"

"Well," answered MacShaughnassy, "if one admits the possibility of
spirits retaining any interest in the affairs of this world at all, it is
certainly more reasonable to imagine them engaged upon a task such as you
suggest, than to believe that they occupy themselves with the performance
of mere drawing-room tricks. But what are you leading up to?"

"Why, to this," replied Jephson, seating himself straddle-legged across
his chair, and leaning his arms upon the back. "I was told a story this
morning at the hospital by an old French doctor. The actual facts are
few and simple; all that is known can be read in the Paris police records
of sixty-two years ago.

"The most important part of the case, however, is the part that is not
known, and that never will be known.

"The story begins with a great wrong done by one man unto another man.
What the wrong was I do not know. I am inclined to think, however, it
was connected with a woman. I think that, because he who had been
wronged hated him who had wronged him with a hate such as does not often
burn in a man's brain, unless it be fanned by the memory of a woman's
breath.

"Still that is only conjecture, and the point is immaterial. The man who
had done the wrong fled, and the other man followed him. It became a
point-to-point race, the first man having the advantage of a day's start.
The course was the whole world, and the stakes were the first man's life.

"Travellers were few and far between in those days, and this made the
trail easy to follow. The first man, never knowing how far or how near
the other was behind him, and hoping now and again that he might have
baffled him, would rest for a while. The second man, knowing always just
how far the first one was before him, never paused, and thus each day the
man who was spurred by Hate drew nearer to the man who was spurred by
Fear.

"At this town the answer to the never-varied question would be:--

"'At seven o'clock