He had compunction enough about the major triumph which now seemed in certain store for him; the larger it loomed, the less triumphant and the more tragic was its promise.  And, with all human perversity, an unforeseen and quite involuntary sympathy with Steel was the last complication in Langholm’s mind.

He had to think of Rachel in order to harden his heart against her husband; and that ground was the most dangerous of all.  It was strange to Langholm to battle against that by the bedside of a weaker brother fallen in the same fight.  Yet it was there he spent the night.  He had scarcely slept all the week.  It was a comfort to think that this vigil was a useful one.

Severino slept fitfully, and Langholm had never a long stretch of uninterrupted thought.

But before morning he had decided to give Steel a chance.  It was a vague decision, dependent on the chance that Steel gave him when they met, as meet they must.  Meanwhile Langholm had some cause for satisfaction with the mere resolve; it defined the line that he took with a somewhat absurd but equally startling visitor, who waited upon him early in the forenoon, in the person of the Chief Constable of Northborough.

This worthy had heard of Langholm’s quest, and desired to be informed of what success, if any, he had met with up to the present.  Langholm opened his eyes.

“It’s my own show,” he protested.

“Would you say that if you had got the man?  I doubt it would be our show then!” wheezed the Chief Constable, who was enormously fat.

“It would be Scotland Yard’s,” admitted Langholm, “perhaps.”

“Unless you got him up here,” suggested the fat official.  “In that case you would naturally come to me.”

Langholm met his eyes.  They were very small and bright, as the eyes of the obese often are, or as they seem by contrast with a large crass face.  Langholm fancied he perceived a glimmer of his own enlightenment, and instinctively he lied.

“We are not likely to get him up here,” he said.  “This is about the last place where I should look!”

The Chief Constable took his departure with a curious smile.  Langholm began to feel uneasy; his unforeseen sympathy with Steel assumed the form of an actual fear on his behalf.  Severino was another thorn in his side.  He knew that Rachel had been written to, and fell into a fever of impatience and despair because the morning did not bring her to his bedside.  She was not coming at all.  She had refused to come—­or her husband would not allow it.  So he must die without seeing her again!  The man was as unreasonable as sick men will be; nothing would console him but Langholm’s undertaking to go to Normanthorpe himself after lunch and plead in person with the stony-hearted lady or her tyrannical lord.  This plan suited Langholm well enough.  It would pave the way to the “chance” which he had resolved to give to Rachel’s husband.