“He took a liking to me.  My knowledge of ancient Cornish lore proved useful in the final stages of his search—­his thirty years’ search for a family tree.  It was not long before I discovered that he had found no happiness in life.  At times his face wore a hunted look—­the look of a man who walked his days in fear.  His imperfect vision peered out on a darkened world with apprehension, though not of me.  In my strange position with him I felt like a ghost permitted to watch, unseen and unsuspected, the travail of a gloomy solitary mind.  It was apparent enough, but only to me.  My quickened eyes pierced the outward husk and saw within.  I thought I had outlived my desire for revenge, but it grew again at the sight of a punishment which was so much more subtle than anything I could have planned.  Death would have put his restless soul to sleep, granted him eternal respite.  The sufferings of the spirit were a living torment.  His was a strange case.  His lifelong pursuit of a single idea, his restricted consciousness of one image, had made him morbid, lonely, introspective.  And so the past had revisited him, darkening and disquieting his mind.  He feared shadows, he was haunted by footsteps.

“Footsteps!  I learnt that when he consulted me for sleeplessness.  He told me he used to lie awake at night, imagining he heard footsteps pattering on the rocks outside.  I knew well enough whose footsteps he was haunted by.  I imagined him lying there in that lonely house, sweating with horror, listening ... listening.  He asked me once, did I believe in ghosts?  I told him no, but I said I’d known a case of man returning to life long after he was supposed to be dead.  I related the story—­one which had come under my observation as a medical man.  He listened with gnawing lip and pale face, and from my window afterwards I saw him striding home across the moors, glancing backwards in the dusk.

“It was his own fault that he ever heard those footsteps in the way he feared.  He did not play the game, according to our poor conception of what the game is.  If he had done so he would have been quite safe from me.  But there are some things too shocking to be contemplated, even in the worst of our kind.  A man does not give away a woman—­that is one of the rules.  Robert Turold put a woman to shame in her coffin.

“I had kept out of her way, never going to Flint House because I feared her feminine eyes might be too sharp for me.  But she fell ill, and Robert Turold asked me to attend her.  Refusal was impossible, as there was no other doctor nearer than Penzance.

“She did not recognize me—­at first, but the shock I received when I saw her left me almost stunned.  I had carried her memory through the years—­the image of a pretty slim girl, with brown hair and eyes, and kind of soft vivacity which was her greatest charm.  In her place I found, lying there, a withered grey woman with dim eyes and broken spirit.  God knows what she had gone through at his hands, but it had destroyed her.