But now—­to-night—­he was face to face with something of an infinitely more serious nature.  This man with the stern, accusing eyes and wholly merciless attitude—­what had he come to say?  An odd sensation stirred at Dacre’s heart like an unsteady hand knocking for admittance.  There was something wrong here—–­ something wrong.

“You—­madman!” he said at length, and with the words pulled himself together with a giant effort.  “What in the name of wonder are you doing here?” He had bitten his cigar through in his astonishment, and he tossed it away as he spoke with a gesture of returning confidence.  He silenced the uneasy foreboding within and met the hard eyes that confronted him without discomfiture.  “What’s your game?” he said.  “You have come to tell me something, I suppose.  But why on earth couldn’t you write it?”

“The written word is not always effectual,” the other man said.

He put up a hand abruptly and stripped the ragged hair from his face, pushing back the heavy folds of the chuddah that enveloped his head as he did so.  His features gleamed in the moonlight, lean and brown, unmistakably British.

“Monck!” said Dacre, in the tone of one verifying a suspicion.

“Yes—­Monck.”  Grimly the other repeated the name.  “I’ve had considerable trouble in following you here.  I shouldn’t have taken it if I hadn’t had a very urgent reason.”

“Well, what the devil is it?” Dacre spoke with the exasperation of a man who knows himself to be at a disadvantage.  “If you want to know my opinion, I regard such conduct as damned intrusive at such a time.  But if you’ve any decent excuse let’s hear it!”

He had never adopted that tone to Monck before, but he had been rudely jolted out of his usually complacent attitude, and he resented Monck’s presence.  Moreover, an unpleasant sense of inferiority had begun to make itself felt.  There was something judicial about Monck—­something inexorable and condemnatory—­something that aroused in him every instinct of self-defence.

But Monck met his blustering demand with the utmost calm.  It was as if he held him in a grip of iron intention from which no struggles, however desperate, could set him free.

He took an envelope from the folds of his ragged raiment.  “I believe you have heard me speak of my brother Bernard,” he said, “chaplain of Charthurst Prison.”

Dacre nodded.  “The fellow who writes to you every month.  Well?  What of him?”

Monck’s steady fingers detached and unfolded a letter.  “You had better read for yourself,” he said, and held it out.

But curiously Dacre hung back as if unwilling to touch it.

“Can’t you tell me what all the fuss is about?” he said irritably.

Monck’s hand remained inflexibly extended.  He spoke, a jarring note in his voice.  “Oh yes, I can tell you.  But you had better see for yourself too.  It concerns you very nearly.  It was written in Charthurst Prison nearly six weeks ago, where a woman who calls herself your wife is undergoing a term of imprisonment for forgery.”