letter, which I had kept in the letter-case in my pocket. He returned
it to me without a word. Presently he broke a spell of silence. All
this time he had sat fixed in the one attitude--only shifted once, when
Marigold entered to clear away the breakfast things and was dismissed
by me with a glance and a gesture.

"Do you remember," he said, "a talk we had about fear, in April, the
first time I was over? I described what I knew. The paralysis of fear.
Since we are talking as I never thought to talk with a human being, I
may as well make my confession. I'm a man of strong animal passions.
When I see red, I daresay I'm just a brute beast. But I'm a physical
coward. Owing to this paralysis of fear, this ghastly inhibition of
muscular or nervous action, I have gone through things even worse than
that South-African business. I go about like a man under a curse. Even
out there, when I don't care a damn whether I live or die, the blasted
thing gets hold of me." He swung himself away from the table and shook
his great clenched firsts. "By the grace of God, no one yet has seemed
to notice it. I suppose I have a swift brain and as soon as the thing
is over I can cover it up. It's my awful terror that one day I shall be
found out and everything I've gained shall be stripped away from me."

"But what about a thing like this?" said I, tapping Colonel Dacre's
letter.

"That's all right," he answered grimly. "That's when I know what I'm
facing. That's deliberate pot-hunting. It's saving face as the Chinese
say. It's doing any damned thing that will put me right with myself."

He got up and swung about the room. I envied him, I would have given a
thousand pounds to do the same just for a few moments. But I was stuck
in my confounded chair, deprived of physical outlet. Suddenly he came
to a halt and stood once more over me.

"Now you know what kind of a fellow I am, what do you think of me?"

It was a brutal question to fling at my head. It gave me no time to
co-ordinate my ideas. What was one to make of a man avowedly subject to
fits of the most despicable cowardice from the consequences of which he
used any unscrupulous craftiness to extricate himself, and yet was
notorious in his achievement of deeds of the most reckless courage? It
is a problem to which I have devoted all the months occupied in waiting
this book. How the dickens could I solve it at a minute's notice? The
situation was too blatant, too raw, too near bedrock, to