“A letter!”

“Yes, giving a reason for his desertion.  Some chap was running after his girl and had got her in a corner and bullied her into saying ‘Yes,’ though she hated the sight of him.  I’d have done anything for Tom.  But he took the law into his own hands.  He disappeared—­we were at Shorncliffe then if I remember rightly.  The chap had joined to get abroad, and he told me all his harum-scarum ambitions once.  I hope the poor devil was in time to rescue his sweetheart, anyway.”

“Yes, he was in time for that.”

“I’m glad.”

“Should you see him again, Tremayne, I would advise your pretending not to know him.  Unless, of course, you consider it your duty to proclaim him.”

“Bless your life, I don’t know him from Adam,” declared the Major.  “I’m not going to move after all these years.  I wish he’d come back to me again, all the same.  A good servant.”

“Poor brute!  What’s the procedure with a deserter?  Do you send soldiers for him or the police?”

“A pair of handcuffs and the local bobby, that’s all.  Then the man’s handed over to the military authorities and court-martialled.”

“What would he get?”

“Depends on circumstances and character.  Tom might probably have six months, as he didn’t give himself up.  I should have thought, knowing the manner of man, that he would have done his business, married the girl, then come back and surrendered.  In that case, being peace time, he would only have forfeited his service, which didn’t amount to much.”

So John Grimbal learned the secret of his enemy at last; but, to pursue a former simile, the fruit had remained so long out of reach that now it was not only overripe, but rotten.  There began a painful resuscitation of desires towards revenge—­desires long moribund.  To flog into life a passion near dead of inanition was Grimbal’s disgusting task.  For days and nights the thing was as Frankenstein’s creation of grisly shreds and patches; then it moved spasmodically,—­or he fancied that it moved.

He fooled himself with reiterated assurances that he was glorying in the discovery; he told himself that he was not made of the human stuff that can forgive bitter wrongs or forget them until cancelled.  He painted in lurid colours his past griefs; through a ghastly morass of revenge grown stale, of memories deadened by time, he tried to struggle back to his original starting-point in vanished years, and feel as he felt when he flung Will Blanchard over Rushford Bridge.

Once he wished to God the truth had never reached him; then he urged himself to use it instantly and plague his mind no more.  A mental exhaustion and nausea overtook him.  Upon the night of his discovery he retired to sleep wishing that Blanchard would be as good as his rumoured word and get out of England.  But this thought took a shape of reality in the tattered medley of dreams, and Grimbal, waking, leapt on to the floor in frantic fear that his enemy had escaped him.