“My money,” he continued, “was no large sum, but I eked it out with gambling.  The luck was always on my side.  It’s quite true that I ruined the father of the young lady who paid me a visit to-day.  After a somewhat chequered career he was settling down in a merchant’s office in Montreal when I met him.  His luck at cards was as bad as mine was good.  I won all he had, and more.  I believe that he committed suicide.  A man there was kind to me, asked me to his house—­I persuaded his wife to run away with me.  These are amongst the slightest of my delinquencies.  I steeped myself in sin.  I revelled in it.  I seemed to myself in some way to be showing my defiance for the hidden powers of life which I had cursed.  I played a match with evil by day and by night until I was glutted.  And then I stole away from the city, leaving behind a hideous reputation and not a single friend.  Then a new mood came to me.  I wanted to get to a place where I should see no human beings at all, and escape in that way from the memories which were still like a clot upon my brain.  So I set my face westwards.  I travelled till at last civilization lay behind.  Still I pushed onward.  I had stores in plenty, an Indian servant who chanced to be faithful, and whom I saw but twice a day.  At last I reached Lake Ono.  Here between us we built a hut.  I sent my Indian away then, and when he fawned at my feet to stay I kicked him.  This was my third phase of living, and it was true that some measure of sanity came back to me.  Oh, the blessed relief of seeing the face of neither man nor woman.  It was the unpeopled world of Nature—­uncorrupted, fresh, magnificent, alive by day and by night with everlasting music of Nature.  The solitudes of those great forests were like a wonderful balm.  So the fevers were purged out of me, and I became once more an ordinary human being.  I was content, I think, to die there, for I had plenty to eat and drink, and the animals and birds who came to me morning and evening kept me from even the thought of loneliness.  The rest is obvious.  I lost two cousins in South Africa, an uncle in the hunting-field.  A man in Montreal had recognized me.  I was discovered.  But before I returned I killed Brooks, the police-court missionary.  This girl has forced me to bring him to life again.”

It was a strange silence which followed.  Brooks sat back in his chair, pale, bewildered, striving to focus this story properly, to attain a proper comprehension of these new strange things.  And behind all there smouldered the slow burning anger of the child who has looked into the face of a deserted mother.  Lady Caroom was white to the lips, and in her eyes the horror of that story so pitilessly told seemed still to linger.

Lord Arranmore spoke again.  Still he sat back in his high-backed chair, and still he spoke in measured, monotonous tones.  But this time, if only their ears had been quick enough to notice it, there lay behind an emotion, held in check indeed, but every now and then quivering for expression.  He had turned to Lady Caroom.