He did not die, however.  In about another week he was well enough to move.  We carried him down to Mozufferpoor, the first large town in the plains thereabouts, and handed him over for the stage of convalescence to the care of the able and efficient station doctor, to whom my thanks are due for much courteous assistance.

“And now, what do you mean to do?” I asked Hilda, when our patient was placed in other hands, and all was over.

She answered me without one second’s hesitation:  “Go straight to Bombay, and wait there till Sebastian takes passage for England.”

“He will go home, you think, as soon as he is well enough?”

“Undoubtedly.  He has now nothing more to stop in India for.”

“Why not as much as ever?”

She looked at me curiously.  “It is so hard to explain,” she replied, after a moment’s pause, during which she had been drumming her little forefinger on the table.  “I feel it rather than reason it.  But don’t you see that a certain change has lately come over Sebastian’s attitude?  He no longer desires to follow me; he wants to avoid me.  That is why I wish more than ever to dog his steps.  I feel the beginning of the end has come.  I am gaining my point.  Sebastian is wavering.”

“Then when he engages a berth, you propose to go by the same steamer?”

“Yes.  It makes all the difference.  When he tries to follow we, he is dangerous; when he tries to avoid me, it becomes my work in life to follow him.  I must keep him in sight every minute now.  I must quicken his conscience.  I must make him feel his own desperate wickedness.  He is afraid to face me:  that means remorse.  The more I compel him to face me, the more the remorse is sure to deepen.”

I saw she was right.  We took the train to Bombay.  I found rooms at the hospitable club, by a member’s invitation, while Hilda went to stop with some friends of Lady Meadowcroft’s on the Malabar Hill.  We waited for Sebastian to come down from the interior and take his passage.  Hilda, with her intuitive certainty, felt sure he would come.

A steamer, two steamers, three steamers, sailed, and still no Sebastian.  I began to think he must have made up his mind to go back some other way.  But Hilda was confident, so I waited patiently.  At last one morning I dropped in, as I had often done before, at the office of one of the chief steamship companies.  It was the very morning when a packet was to sail.  “Can I see the list of passengers on the Vindhya?” I asked of the clerk, a sandy-haired Englishman, tall, thin, and sallow.

The clerk produced it.

I scanned it in haste.  To my surprise and delight, a pencilled entry half-way down the list gave the name, “Professor Sebastian.”

“Oh, Sebastian is going by this steamer?” I murmured, looking up.