There was no signature, but written like an afterthought across one corner of the note were the scribbled words: 

“You told me something once, I don’t know if you meant it.”  And then, underneath, was the addition—­“He never stops smiling.”

Twice over Dunn read this strange, disturbing message, and then a third time, and he made a little gesture of annoyance for it did not seem to him that the words he read made sense, or else it was that his brain no longer worked normally, and could not interpret them.

“Oh, but that’s absurd,” he said aloud.

He looked all around him, surprised to see that the face of the country-side had not changed in any way, but was all just as it had been before this letter had been put into his hands.

He began to read a third, but stopped half-way through the first sentence.

“Then it’s Walter all the time,” he muttered.  “Walter—­Walter!”

CHAPTER XXVI

A RACE AGAINST TIME

Even when he had said this aloud it was still as though he could not grasp its full meaning.

“Walter,” he repeated vaguely.  “Walter.”

His thoughts, that had seemed as frozen by the sudden shock of the tremendous revelation so unconsciously made to him by Ella, began to stir and move again, and almost at once, with an extraordinary and abnormal rapidity.

As a drowning man is said to see flash before his eyes the whole history and record of his life, so now Dunn saw the whole story of his life-long friendship with Walter pictured before him.

For when he was very small, Walter had been to him like an elder brother, and when he was older, it was Walter who had taught him to ride and to shoot, to hunt and to fish, and when he was at school it was Walter to whom he looked up as the dashing young man of the world, who knew all life’s secrets, and when he was at college it was Walter who had helped him out of the inevitable foolish scrapes into which it is the custom of the undergraduate to fall.

Then, when he had come to man’s estate, Walter had still been his confidential friend and adviser.  In Walter’s hand he had been accustomed to leave everything during his absences on his hunting and exploring trips; and at what time during this long and kindly association of good-fellowship had such black hate and poison of envy bred in Walter’s heart?

“Walter!” he said aloud once more, and he uttered the name as though it were a cry of anguish.

Yet, too, even in his utter bewilderment and surprise, it seemed strange to him that he had never once suspected, never dreamed, never once had the shadow of a suspicion.

Little things, trifling things, a word, an accent, a phrase that had passed at the time for a lest, a thousand such memories came back to him now with a new and terrible significance.

For, after all, Walter was in the direct line.  Only just a few lives stood between him and a great inheritance, a great position.  Perhaps long brooding on what might so easily be had made him mad.