e asked to stay
longer and preach next Sunday instead. But then he had deliberately
told me he had preached, and that the people had been so pleased that
they had invited him to preach again. It sounded like a schoolboy's
boastfulness!

Of course if he were the sort of man who would (like myself) have drawn
the line at conducting a bogus religious service, I could quite well
understand his getting out of it somehow. But when I remembered his
tale of the murder of the real Mr Burnett, I dismissed that hypothesis.
Besides, why deceive me in any case? I daresay I should have felt a
little anxious as to the result if he had evaded the duty he had
professed to come up and perform, but would he care twopence about
that? I did not believe it.

And then his method of getting Eileen into the islands, though
ingenious enough (if not very original), had been marred by the most
inconceivable recklessness. Surely some better scheme could have been
devised for getting her out of the Craigies' house than a sudden flight
without a word of explanation--and a flight, moreover, to another house
in the same island where gossip would certainly spread in the course of
a very few days. Of course Mr Craigie's extraordinary character gave
the scheme a chance it never deserved, but was Tiel really so
diabolically clever that he actually counted on that? How could he
have known so much of Craigie's character? Indeed, that explanation
was inconceivable.

And then again, why had Eileen consented to such a wild plan? That
neither of them should have realised its drawbacks seemed quite
extraordinary. There must be some deep cunning about it that escaped
me altogether. If it were not so, we were lost indeed! And so I
resolved to believe that there was more wisdom in the scheme than I
realised, and simply leave it at that.

Thereupon I sat down and wrote for an hour or two to keep me from
thinking further on the subject, and at last about midnight I resolved
to go to bed. The want of fresh air had been troubling me greatly, and
it struck me that a safe way of getting a little would be to put my
head through the open skylight for a few minutes. It was quite dark in
the cupboard, so that no light could escape; and I brought a chair
along, stood on it, and looked out, with my head projecting from the
midst of the sloping slates, and a beautiful cool breeze refreshing my
face.

So cool was the wind that there was evidently north in it