, that fellow's got a fortune when he likes to pick it up. It
is a wonderful stuff--you tell him salt water can do nothing to it. It
stays on as long as your hair will."

"All right," I said. "Go on."

Thereupon he went for Johns again with a fury that frightened his wife,
and made me laugh till I cried.

"Just you try to think what it would have meant to be at the mercy of
the meanest creature that ever commanded a ship! Just fancy what a life
that crawling Johns would have led me! And I knew that in a week or so
the white hair would begin to show. And the crew. Did you ever think of
that? To be shown up as a low fraud before all hands. What a life for me
till we got to Calcutta! And once there--kicked out, of course. Half-pay
stopped. Annie here alone without a penny--starving; and I on the other
side of the earth, ditto. You see?

"I thought of shaving twice a day. But could I shave my head, too?
No way--no way at all. Unless I dropped Johns overboard; and even
then------

"Do you wonder now that with all these things boiling in my head I didn't
know where I was putting down my foot that night? I just felt myself
falling--then crash, and all dark.

"When I came to myself that bang on the head seemed to have steadied my
wits somehow. I was so sick of everything that for two days I wouldn't
speak to anyone. They thought it was a slight concussion of the brain.
Then the idea dawned upon me as I was looking at that ghost-ridden,
wretched fool. 'Ah, you love ghosts,' I thought. 'Well, you shall have
something from beyond the grave.'

"I didn't even trouble to invent a story. I couldn't imagine a ghost
if I wanted to. I wasn't fit to lie connectedly if I had tried. I just
bulled him on to it. Do you know, he got, quite by himself, a notion
that at some time or other I had done somebody to death in some way, and
that------"

"Oh, the horrible man!" cried Mrs. Bunter from the sofa. There was a
silence.

"And didn't he bore my head off on the home passage!" began Bunter again
in a weary voice. "He loved me. He was proud of me. I was converted. I
had had a manifestation. Do you know what he was after? He wanted me and
him 'to make a _seance_,' in his own words, and to try to call up that
ghost (the one that had turned my hair white--the ghost of my supposed
victim), and, as he said, talk it over with him--the ghost--in a
friendly way.

"'Or else, Bunter,' he says, 'you may get another manifestation when you
least