Still with his arm in Mary’s, he bent forward and kissed the old man on the forehead.  “I shall miss you, old friend,” he said.  Then, with gentle insistence, he led Mary away.  They left the old man, propped up by the high stool on which his feet rested, seated far back in the great chair, hard by Captain Duggle’s grave, where the scepter lay on a carpet of gold.  The tall candles burnt on either side of his throne, imparting a far-off semblance of ceremonial state.

Thus died, unmarried, in the seventy-first year of his age, Aloysius William Saffron, formerly of Exeter, Surveyor and Auctioneer.  He had run, on the whole, a creditable course; starting from small beginnings, and belonging to a family more remarkable for eccentricity than for any solid merit, he had built up a good practice; he had made money and put it by; he enjoyed a good name for financial probity.  But he was held to be a vain, fussy, self-important, peacocky fellow; very self-centered also and (as Beaumaroy had indicated) impatient of the family and social obligations which most men recognize, even though often unwillingly.  As the years gathered upon his head, these characteristics were intensified.  On the occasion of some trifling set-back in business—­a rival cut him out in a certain negotiation—­He threw up everything and disappeared from his native town.  Thenceforward nothing was heard of him there, save that he wrote occasionally to his cousin, Sophia Radbolt, and her husband, both of whom he most cordially hated, whose claims to his notice, regard, or assistance he had, of late years at least, hotly resented.  Yet he wrote to them—­wrote them vaunting and magniloquent letters, hinting darkly of great doings and great riches.  In spite of their opinion of him, the Radbolts came to believe perhaps half of what he said; he was old and without other ties; their thirst for his money was greedy.  Undoubtedly the Radbolts would dearly have loved to get hold of him and—­somehow—­hold him fast.

When he came to Tower Cottage—­it was in the first year of the war—­he was precariously sane; it was only gradually that his fundamental and constitutional vices and foibles turned to a morbid growth.  First came intensified hatred and suspicion of the Radbolts—­they were after him and his money!  Then, through hidden processes of mental distortion, there grew the conviction that he was of high importance, a great man, the object of great conspiracies, in which the odious Radbolts were but instruments.  It was, no doubt, the course of public events, culminating in the Great War, which gave to his mania its special turn, to his delusion its monstrous (but, as Doctor Mary was aware, by no means unprecedented) character.  By the time of his meeting with Beaumaroy the delusion was complete; through all the second half of 1918 he followed—­so far as his mind could now follow anything rationally—­in his own person and fortunes the fate of the man whom he believed himself to be, appropriating the hopes, the fears, the imagined ambitions, the physical infirmity, of that self-created other self.