eply in a voice that he strove vainly to make light.

"Sure, they're your own, sir." The other looked up quickly. "I'll get
everything ready for a bath, and if you've a mind for anything to eat
afterward--"

"I think I'll have a little of the last, first," said the visitor
slowly.

"Right you are, sir. You do look a bit done up, sir," sympathetically,
"but there's a veal and 'ammer in the cupboard that will soon make you
fit."

"One moment, Dennis." John Steele leaned back; the dying embers revealed
a haggard face; his eyes half closed as if from lack of sleep but
immediately opened again. "You spoke of expecting me; how," he stretched
out his legs, "did you know--?"

"Sure, sir, by your luggage; it arrived with my master's heavier boxes
that he didn't take along with him over the wather." The listener did
not stir; was he too weary to experience surprise or even deeper
emotion?

His luggage there!--where no one knew--could have known, he was going!
The place he had selected, under what he had considered propitious
circumstances, as a haven, a refuge; where he might find himself for a
brief period comparatively safe, could he reach it, turn in, without
being detected! This last he believed he had successfully accomplished;
and then to be told by the man--All John Steele's excuses for coming in
this unceremonious fashion that he had planned to put to the servant of
Captain Forsythe were at the moment forgotten. Who could have guessed
that he would make his way straight hither--or had any one? An enemy,
divining a lurking place for which he was heading, would not have
obligingly forwarded his belongings. What then? Had Jocelyn Wray ordered
them sent on with Captain Forsythe's boxes and bags, in order that they
might be less likely to fall into the hands of the police?

This line of reasoning seemed to lead into most unwonted channels; it
was not probable she would concern herself so much further about a
common fugitive. The cut and bruised fingers of the man before the
fireplace linked and unlinked; an indefinable feeling of new dangers he
had not calculated on assailed him. Suppose the police should have
learned--should elect to trace, those articles of his? It was a
contingency, a hazard to be considered; he knew that every possible
effort would be made to find him; that if his antagonists were eager
before, they would embark on the present quest with redoubled zeal. He
had been in their hands and had got away;