“No; look here—­deception is bad; but not to be able to keep it up after one has been forced into it.  You know that since I’ve been squeezed out of the Western Ocean packets by younger men, just on account of my grizzled muzzle—­you know how much chance I had to ever get a ship.  And not a soul to turn to.  We have been a lonely couple, we two—­she threw away everything for me--and to see her want a piece of dry bread------”

He banged with his fist fit to split the Frenchman’s table in two.

“I would have turned a sanguinary pirate for her, let alone cheating my way into a berth by dyeing my hair.  So when you came to me with your chemist’s wonderful stuff------”

He checked himself.

“By the way, that fellow’s got a fortune when he likes to pick it up.  It is a wonderful stuff—­you tell him salt water can do nothing to it.  It stays on as long as your hair will.”

“All right,” I said.  “Go on.”

Thereupon he went for Johns again with a fury that frightened his wife, and made me laugh till I cried.

“Just you try to think what it would have meant to be at the mercy of the meanest creature that ever commanded a ship!  Just fancy what a life that crawling Johns would have led me!  And I knew that in a week or so the white hair would begin to show.  And the crew.  Did you ever think of that?  To be shown up as a low fraud before all hands.  What a life for me till we got to Calcutta!  And once there—­kicked out, of course.  Half-pay stopped.  Annie here alone without a penny—­starving; and I on the other side of the earth, ditto.  You see?

“I thought of shaving twice a day.  But could I shave my head, too?  No way—­no way at all.  Unless I dropped Johns overboard; and even then------

“Do you wonder now that with all these things boiling in my head I didn’t know where I was putting down my foot that night?  I just felt myself falling—­then crash, and all dark.

“When I came to myself that bang on the head seemed to have steadied my wits somehow.  I was so sick of everything that for two days I wouldn’t speak to anyone.  They thought it was a slight concussion of the brain.  Then the idea dawned upon me as I was looking at that ghost-ridden, wretched fool.  ‘Ah, you love ghosts,’ I thought.  ’Well, you shall have something from beyond the grave.’

“I didn’t even trouble to invent a story.  I couldn’t imagine a ghost if I wanted to.  I wasn’t fit to lie connectedly if I had tried.  I just bulled him on to it.  Do you know, he got, quite by himself, a notion that at some time or other I had done somebody to death in some way, and that------”

“Oh, the horrible man!” cried Mrs. Bunter from the sofa.  There was a silence.

“And didn’t he bore my head off on the home passage!” began Bunter again in a weary voice.  “He loved me.  He was proud of me.  I was converted.  I had had a manifestation.  Do you know what he was after?  He wanted me and him ‘to make a seance,’ in his own words, and to try to call up that ghost (the one that had turned my hair white—­the ghost of my supposed victim), and, as he said, talk it over with him—­the ghost—­in a friendly way.