n the last. Old Sir
Christopher was the only sober man at his own orgy, but my satanic
ancestor seems to have made a mighty clean job of this poor brute!"

"I'm not so sure," said I gloomily. "I'm only sure of one thing--that
the dead can't lead the living astray--and you'll never convince me that
they can."

It was no use arguing, for we were oil and vinegar on this matter, and
were beginning to recognise the fact. But I was grateful to Uvo Delavoye
for his attitude on another point. I tried to explain why I had never
told him about my last meeting with Abercromby Royle. It was not
necessary; there he understood me in a moment; and so it was in almost
everything except this one perverse obsession, due in my opinion to a
morbid imagination, which in its turn I attributed to the wretched
muddle that the Egyptian climate had made of poor Uvo's inner man. While
not actually an invalid, there was little hope of his being fit for work
of any sort for a year or more; and I remember feeling glad when he told
me he had obtained a reader's ticket for the British Museum, but very
sorry when I found that his principal object was to pursue his Witching
Hill will-o'-the-wisp to an extent impossible in the local library.
Indeed, it was no weather for close confinement on even the healthiest
intellectual quest. Yet it was on his way home from the museum that Uvo
had picked up Coysh outside my office, and that was where he was when
Coysh came down again before the week was out.

This time I was in, and sweltering over the schedule of finishings for
the house in which he had found me before, when my glass door darkened
and the whole office shook beneath his ominous tread. With his back to
the light, the little round man looked perfectly black with rage; and if
he did not actually shake his fist in my face, that is the impression
that I still retain of his outward attitude.

His words came in a bitter torrent, but their meaning might have been
stated in one breath. Royle had not gone to America at all. Neither in
his own name nor any other had he booked his passage at the London
office of the Tuesday, or either of the Wednesday steamers, nor as yet
in any of those sailing on the following Saturday. So Coysh declared,
with characteristic conviction, as proof positive that a given being
could not possibly have sailed for the United States under any
conceivable disguise or alias. He had himself made a round of the said
London offices, a