He was recalled to his surroundings by a hand laid on his arm.  He started and looked round.  The man next to him, with a glance at the paper in his hand, asked him if he could tell him the winner of the second race at Lingfield.  “It ought to be in the stop-press,” he murmured.  Charles turned the sheet to the indicated column, and the inquirer glanced at it with a satisfied smile, and the remark that it was only what he had expected, in spite of the weight.  “A good horse,” he remarked approvingly.  “But perhaps you don’t go in for racing yourself?”

Charles resisted an insane impulse to shout with laughter.  Didn’t go in for racing!  He was going in for racing with a vengeance—­a race against time and the police.  What was he to do now?

He glanced round him restlessly.  The swaying noisy train and the compartment packed with stolid faces jarred on his overburdened nerves.  Why were those women in the next compartment laughing like hyenas?  What was there in life to laugh over at any time?  It was a thing to impose silence on all by its desolation, its unescapable doom.  His eye was caught by an advertisement above the rack opposite him—­an advertisement which depicted a smiling grotesque face, and advised him to buy the comic journal it represented in order to dissipate melancholy and gloom.

Fools—­fools all!

While he was thus looking around him his eyes encountered a curious glance from the man in the opposite corner seat, who had been in the compartment when he entered the train at Charleswood.  The man dropped his gaze at once, but there was something in the quality of the look which put Charles on his guard.  Charles did not turn his head again, but, leaning back in his seat, kept the other under view from seemingly closed eyes.  He was soon convinced that the man in the corner seat was watching him—­shooting furtive glances across the carriage from behind the screen of his newspaper.

Was he a detective?  Not if Barrant was a usual representative of the tribe.  Yet there was something infernally quizzical in the scrutiny which reached him through those gold-rimmed glasses.  Stay, though!  Did detectives wear glasses?  Wasn’t there an eyesight test or something like that for officers of the law?  He had never seen a policeman wearing glasses.  If he was not a detective, why was he watching him?  There was no reward offered for his arrest.  Perhaps he belonged to the wretched type of beings who pride themselves on their public spirit—­men who wrote letters to the newspapers and interfered in other people’s business.  The beast might have guessed his identity and wanted to show his public spirit by handing him over to the police.  The newspaper in his hand!  Of course.  He had read his description there, and identified him.