‘So!’ he exclaimed.  ‘It’s you!’

‘Do you know this man?’ I asked.

’I am hardly prepared to go so far as to say that I know him, but, I chance to have a memory for faces, and it happens that I have met this gentleman on at least one previous occasion.  Perhaps he remembers me.—­Do you?’

The stranger seemed uneasy,—­as if he found Sidney’s tone and manner disconcerting.

‘I do.  You are the man in the street.’

’Precisely.  I am that—­individual.  And you are the man who came through the window.  And in a much more comfortable condition you appear to be than when first I saw you.’  Sydney turned to me.  ’It is just possible, Miss Lindon, that I may have a few remarks to make to this gentleman which would be better made in private,—­if you don’t mind.’

’But I do mind,—­I mind very much.  What do you suppose I sent for you here for?’

Sydney smiled that absurd, provoking smile of his,—­as if the occasion were not sufficiently serious.

’To show that you still repose in me a vestige of your confidence.’

’Don’t talk nonsense.  This man has told me a most extraordinary story, and I have sent for you—­as you may believe, not too willingly’—­Sydney bowed—­’in order that he may repeat it in your presence, and in mine.’

’Is that so?—­Well!-Permit me to offer you a chair,—­this tale may turn out to be a trifle long.’

To humour him I accepted the chair he offered, though I should have preferred to stand;—­he seated himself on the side of the bed, fixing on the stranger those keen, quizzical, not too merciful, eyes of his.

’Well, sir, we are at your service,—­if you will be so good as to favour us with a second edition of that pleasant yarn you have been spinning.  But—­let us begin at the right end!—­what’s your name?’

‘My name is Robert Holt.’

‘That so?—­Then, Mr Robert Holt,—­let her go!’

Thus encouraged, Mr Holt repeated the tale which he had told me, only in more connected fashion than before.  I fancy that Sydney’s glances exercised on him a sort of hypnotic effect, and this kept him to the point,—­he scarcely needed a word of prompting from the first syllable to the last.

He told how, tired, wet, hungry, desperate, despairing, he had been refused admittance to the casual ward,—­that unfailing resource, as one would have supposed, of those who had abandoned even hope.  How he had come upon an open window in an apparently empty house, and, thinking of nothing but shelter from the inclement night, he had clambered through it.  How he had found himself in the presence of an extraordinary being, who, in his debilitated and nervous state, had seemed to him to be only half human.  How this dreadful creature had given utterance to wild sentiments of hatred towards Paul Lessingham,—­my Paul!  How he had taken advantage of Holt’s enfeebled state to gain over him the most complete,