were delayed. When we reached the lobby the
Count had disappeared, and the foreigner with the scar was gone too.

"Come home," I said; "come home, Pesca to your lodgings. I must speak
to you in private--I must speak directly."

"My-soul-bless-my-soul!" cried the Professor, in a state of the
extremest bewilderment. "What on earth is the matter?"

I walked on rapidly without answering. The circumstances under which
the Count had left the theatre suggested to me that his extraordinary
anxiety to escape Pesca might carry him to further extremities still.
He might escape me, too, by leaving London. I doubted the future if I
allowed him so much as a day's freedom to act as he pleased. And I
doubted that foreign stranger, who had got the start of us, and whom I
suspected of intentionally following him out.

With this double distrust in my mind, I was not long in making Pesca
understand what I wanted. As soon as we two were alone in his room, I
increased his confusion and amazement a hundredfold by telling him what
my purpose was as plainly and unreservedly as I have acknowledged it
here.

"My friend, what can I do?" cried the Professor, piteously appealing to
me with both hands. "Deuce-what-the-deuce! how can I help you, Walter,
when I don't know the man?"

"HE knows YOU--he is afraid of you--he has left the theatre to escape
you. Pesca! there must be a reason for this. Look back into your own
life before you came to England. You left Italy, as you have told me
yourself, for political reasons. You have never mentioned those
reasons to me, and I don't inquire into them now. I only ask you to
consult your own recollections, and to say if they suggest no past
cause for the terror which the first sight of you produced in that man."

To my unutterable surprise, these words, harmless as they appeared to
ME, produced the same astounding effect on Pesca which the sight of
Pesca had produced on the Count. The rosy face of my little friend
whitened in an instant, and he drew back from me slowly, trembling from
head to foot.

"Walter!" he said. "You don't know what you ask."

He spoke in a whisper--he looked at me as if I had suddenly revealed to
him some hidden danger to both of us. In less than one minute of time
he was so altered from the easy, lively, quaint little man of all my
past experience, that if I had met him in the street, changed as I saw
him now, I should most certainly not have known him again.