Christmas had come and gone whilst Lord Haddon lay hovering between life and death. As the year turned, he began to regain health and strength; but his progress was exceedingly slow, and all idea of leaving Trevlyn was for the present entirely out of the question. A journey in mid-winter was not to be thought of. It would be enough to bring the whole illness back again; and Monica would not listen when he sometimes said, with diffidence and appeal, that he feared they were encroaching too much upon her hospitality and goodness. In truth, neither brother nor sister were in haste to leave Trevlyn, or to leave Monica alone in her desolate widowhood; and as Haddon’s state of health rendered a move out of the question, the situation was accepted with the more readiness.

Monica was able now to resume something of the even tenor of her way, to take up her daily round of duties, and shape out her life in accordance with her strangely altered circumstances.

All the old sense of dread connected with the sea had now vanished entirely. It never frowned upon her now. It was her friend always—the haunting presentiment of dread had passed away with the actual certainty. Henceforward nothing could hold for her any great measure of terror. She had passed through the very worst already.

Sometimes Monica had a strange feeling that she was not alone during her favourite twilight pacings by the sea. She had a sense of being watched—followed—and the uneasiness of the dogs added to this impression. It troubled her but little, however. She had no fears for herself—she knew, too, that she was a little fanciful, and that it was hardly likely in reality that her footsteps were dogged.

But one dim January evening, as she pursued her way along the margin of the sea, she was startled by seeing some large object lying dark upon the pebbly beach. Her heart beat more fast than was its wont, for she saw as she approached that it was the figure of a man, lying face downwards upon the damp stones.

He did not look like a fisherman, he was too well dressed, and there seemed something not altogether unfamiliar in the aspect of the slight, well-proportioned figure. For a moment she could not recall the association, but as the dogs ran up snuffing and growling, the man started and sat up, revealing the pale, haggard face of Conrad Fitzgerald.

Monica recoiled with an instinctive gesture of aversion. She had not seen him since those summer days when she had been haunted by the vision of his vindictive face and sinister eyes. But how he had changed since then! She could not help looking at him, he was so pale, so thin; his face was lined as if by pain, and his fiery eyes were set in deep hollows. There was something rather awful in his appearance, yet he did not look so wicked, so repulsive, as he had done many times before.

A strange look of terror gleamed in his eyes as they met those of Monica.

“Go away!” he cried wildly. “What do you come here for? Why do you look at me like that? Go—in mercy, go!”

Monica was startled at his wild words and looks. Surely he was mad. But if so, she must show no fear of him; she knew enough to be aware of that.

“What are you doing out here in the dark?” she said. “You ought not to be lying there this cold night. You had better go home, or you will lose your way in the dark.”

He laughed wildly.

“Lose my way in the dark! It is always dark now—always, since that dark night—ha! ha!—that night!” His laugh was terrible in its wild despair. “Why do you look at me? Why do you speak to me? You should not! You should not! You would not if——oh, God! are you a ghost too?”

Such an awful look of horror shone out of his eyes that Monica’s blood ran cold. His gaze was fixed on vacancy. He looked straight at her, yet as if he did not see her, but something beyond. The anguish and despair painted upon that wild, yet still beautiful, face smote Monica’s heart with a sense of deep sorrow and pity.

“I am no ghost, Conrad,” she answered gently, trying if the sound of the old name would drive that wild madness out of his eyes. “Why are you afraid? What are you looking at? There is nothing there.”

For his eyes were still glaring wildly into the darkness beyond, and as Monica spoke he lifted his arm, and pointed to something out at sea.

“Don’t look at me!” he whispered hoarsely, yet not as if he addressed Monica. “Don’t speak to me! If you speak, I shall go mad! I shall go mad, I say! Why do you haunt me so? Why do you look always like that? I had a right—all is fair in love and war—and hate! Why did you give me the chance? I had a vow—a vow in heaven—or hell! Ah! ha! Revenge is sweet, after all!” and he burst into a wild, discordant laugh, dreadful to hear.

Monica shuddered, a sense of horror creeping over her. She did not catch the whole of his words, lost as that hoarse whisper was sometimes in the sullen plash of the advancing waves. The words were not addressed to her, but to some imaginary object visible only to the eye of madness. She attached no meaning to what she heard. She had no clue by which to unravel the workings of his disordered mind. Yet it was terrible to see his terror-stricken face, and listen to the exclamations addressed to a phantom foe. She tried to recall him to himself.

“Conrad, there is no one here but ourselves. You have been dreaming.”

Conrad turned his wild eyes towards her, but continued to point wildly over the sea.

“Can you not see him? There—out there! His head—his eyes—ah, those eyes!—as he looked then—then! Ah, don’t look so at me, I say! You will kill me!”

He buried his face in his hands and shuddered from head to foot. Monica, despite the shiver of horror that crept over her, felt more strongly than anything else a deep pity for one whose mind was so visibly shattered. Much of the past could be condoned to one whose mental faculties were so terribly unstrung. She came one step nearer, and laid her hand upon his arm.

“You should not be out here alone,” she said. “You had better go home. It is growing dark already. If you will come with me to the lodge, I will see that you have a lantern; or, if you like, I will send a servant with a lantern with you.” She felt, indeed, that he was hardly in a condition to be out alone. She wished Tom Pendrill could see him now. But at the touch of her hand Conrad sprang back as if she had struck him. His eyes were full of shrinking horror.

“Go away!” he said fiercely, “your hand burns me—it burns me, I say! How can you look at me or touch me? What have I done that you come here day by day to torment me? Is it not enough that he leaves me no peace night or day?—that he brings me down to this cursed place, whether I will or no, but you must haunt me too? Ah, it is too much—it is too much, I say!”

She could not catch all these rapidly-uttered words, but she read the hopeless misery of his face.

“I do not wish to distress you, Conrad. Will you go home quietly now? You are not well; you should not be out here alone. Have you anybody there to take care of you?”

He laughed again, and flung his arms above his head with a wild gesture of despair.

“You say this to me—you! you! It only wanted this. My God, this is too much!”

He turned from her and sprang away in the darkness. She heard his steps as he dashed recklessly up the cliff path—so recklessly that she half expected to hear the sound of a slip and a fall—and then as he reached the summit and turned inland, they died away into silence.

Monica drew a long breath of relief when she found herself alone. There was something expressibly awful in talking alone to a madman in the dimness of the dying day, in hearing his wild words addressed to some phantom shadow seen only by his disordered vision. She shivered a little as she turned towards him. She could stay no longer in that lonely place.

She met Tom looking out for her on her return. He said something about her staying out too long in the darkness. She laid her hand upon his arm, and pacing up and down the dark avenue, she told him of her adventure with the madman.

“Tom, I am certain he ought to see a doctor. Will you not see if you can do something for him?”

She could not see the expression of Tom’s face. Had she been able to do so, she would have been startled. His voice was very cold as he answered:

“I am not a lunacy commissioner, Monica.”

She was surprised, and a little hurt.

“You are very hard, Tom. You saw him once before, why not again?”

“If he, or his friends for him, require medical advice, I suppose they are capable of sending for it,” he said, adding with sudden fierceness, as it seemed to her, “Monica, Conrad Fitzgerald, ill or well, is nothing to you. It is not fit you should waste a single thought upon that scoundrel again!”

She was surprised at his vehemence; it was so unlike Tom to speak with heat. What had there been in her account of the meeting to discompose him so greatly? Before she could attempt to frame the question, he had asked one of her—asked it abruptly, as it seemed irrelevantly.

“How long has Fitzgerald been in these parts?”

“I don’t know? I have never seen him till to-night, nor heard of him at all?”

“Nor I. Go in, Monica. It is too late for you to be out.”

“And you?”

“I will come presently.”

“And you will think about what I asked you?”

“I will think about it—yes.”

The tone was enigmatic. She could not make Tom out at all, but she went in at his bidding. She knew that he wished to be alone, that he had something disturbing upon his mind, though what it was she could not divine.

Tom, as it turned out, had no choice in the matter; for his brother sent to him next day a message to the effect that Fitzgerald’s servant had been to him with a very sad account of his master, who seemed to be suffering under an acute attack of delirium tremens. Raymond thought his brother, who had seen him once before, had better go the next day in a casual sort of way, and see if he could do anything. Fitzgerald was furious at the idea of having a doctor near him; but possibly he would not regard Tom in that light, and the servants would do all they could to obtain for him access to their master. They were terrified at his ravings, and half afraid he would do himself or them an injury if not placed under proper control.

So Tom, upon the following afternoon, started for the old dilapidated house, without saying a word to anyone as to his destination, and was eagerly admitted by a haggard-looking servant, who said that his master was “terrible bad to-day—it was awful like to hear him go on,” and expressed it as his opinion that he was almost past knowing who was near him, he was so wild and delirious. He had kept his bed for the past two days, having been very ill since coming in, wet and exhausted, on the night Monica had seen him. Between the attacks of delirium he was as weak as a child; and with this much of warning and explanation, Tom was ushered upstairs.

An hour later he left that desolate house with a quick, firm tread, that broke, as he turned a corner and was concealed from view, almost to a run. His face was very pale; it looked thinner and sharper than it had done an hour before, and his eyes were full of an unspeakable horror. Now and again a sort of shudder ran through his frame; but no word passed his tightly-compressed lips. He hurried through the tangled park as if some deadly malaria lurked there. He hardly drew his breath until he had left the trees and brake behind, and had plunged into the wild trackless moor; even then, goaded by his thoughts, he plunged blindly along for a mile or more, until at last, breathless and exhausted, he sank face downwards upon the heather, trembling in every limb.

How long he lay there he never knew. He was roused at last by a touch upon his shoulder, and raising himself with a start, he looked straight into the startled eyes of Beatrice Wentworth.