“You see the beauty of his dilemma.  If he’d been straight, he’d have gone for you; but he wasn’t straight.  He knew well enough that his Robert Redmayne—­the forgery—­wasn’t on the war-path to-night; and when I said I saw nothing, he pulled himself together and swore he hadn’t either.  And the next second he realized what he had done!  But too late.  I had my hand on my shooting iron in my pocket after that, I can tell you!  He was spoiling to hit back—­he is now—­he’s not wasting to-night.  But all that matters for the moment is that we’ve put a crimp on him and he knows it.”

“He may be off before you return to the villa.”

“Not he.  He’s going to see this thing through and finish his job, if we don’t prevent it.  And he won’t waste any more time either.  He’s been playing a game and amusing himself—­with us and Albert yonder—­as a cat with a mouse.  But he won’t play any more.  From to-night he’s going for all three of us bald-headed.  He’s mad with himself that he was foolish enough to delay.  He’s a wonder for his age, Mark; but a man, after all—­not a superman.”

“What happened exactly, and how does he stand to what he saw?”

“Can’t swear, but I figure it like this.  I watched very close with what I call my third eye—­a sort of receiver in my brain that soaks up what a man’s thinking and draws it out of him.  For the first moment he was nonplussed, lost his nerve and may even have believed he saw a spirit.  He cried out, ‘It’s Robert Redmayne !’ and instantly asked me if I’d seen him too.  I stared and said I’d seen nothing at all, and then his manner changed and he laughed it off and said it was only a shadow cast by the shrine.  But, on second thoughts, he knew mighty well it was no shadow, and presently he fell a bit silent, thinking hard, while I just chatted about nothing, as I’d done from the start of our walk.  I’d pretended to take him into my confidence, you see, and I heard from him just exactly what I thought he was going to tell me—­that you were in love with his wife; that he had no more use for her; that she knew all about the red man, and so on.

“Now what passed in his mind?  He must have come to one of two possible conclusions.  Either he suspected that he had been the victim of hallucination and seen a freak of his own imagination, and believed me when I said I had seen nothing; or else he did not.  If he had taken it that way, there was nothing more to be said and nothing to worry about as far as I was concerned.  But he didn’t take it that way and, on second thoughts, he didn’t believe me.  He knew very well indeed that he was not the sort of person who sees ghosts; he remembered that you’d been away at Milan for a couple of days and he tumbled to it, the moment his wits cleared, that this was a frame-up between me and you to surprise something out of him.  And he knew I had got exactly what I wanted, when he swore that he’d seen nothing, after all.