“Steady!” I thought.  I asked him then, “Which of the two do you suppose you saw?”

“The one who had been mauled,” he answered readily, “and I’ll swear I saw him!  The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.”

“This is very curious!” said I, with the best assumption I could put on, of its being nothing more to me.  “Very curious indeed!”

I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson’s having been behind me “like a ghost.”  For, if he had ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments together since the hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was closest to me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my guard after all my care, was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow.  I could not doubt either that he was there, because I was there, and that however slight an appearance of danger there might be about us, danger was always near and active.

I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in?  He could not tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the man.  It was not until he had seen him for some time that he began to identify him; but he had from the first vaguely associated him with me, and known him as somehow belonging to me in the old village time.  How was he dressed?  Prosperously, but not noticeably otherwise; he thought, in black.  Was his face at all disfigured?  No, he believed not.  I believed not, too, for, although in my brooding state I had taken no especial notice of the people behind me, I thought it likely that a face at all disfigured would have attracted my attention.

When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I extract, and when I had treated him to a little appropriate refreshment after the fatigues of the evening, we parted.  It was between twelve and one o’clock when I reached the Temple, and the gates were shut.  No one was near me when I went in and went home.

Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the fire.  But there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to Wemmick what I had that night found out, and to remind him that we waited for his hint.  As I thought that I might compromise him if I went too often to the Castle, I made this communication by letter.  I wrote it before I went to bed, and went out and posted it; and again no one was near me.  Herbert and I agreed that we could do nothing else but be very cautious.  And we were very cautious indeed - more cautious than before, if that were possible — and I for my part never went near Chinks’s Basin, except when I rowed by, and then I only looked at Mill Pond Bank as I looked at anything else.

Chapter 48