oom to room, oppressed by a sense of fear such as he had not
suffered from since Nicky had gone to South Africa. Once he shook his
fist in the air as he waited by himself in the dining-room, whence he
could watch the drive, and the facile, burning tears of age ran down his
face as he spoke aloud of Archelaus in a cracked old voice he hardly
recognised for his own. If Archelaus had let the boy come to any harm,
if he had done him any hurt.... Back on his mind came flooding old
memories of Archelaus--the night in the wood, for instance.... He had
done wrong to believe that even at eighty years old that deep
malevolence had faded. His instinct had been the thing all his life long
which had made genius for him, and he had been wrong not to trust it
now he was old. It was probably the only thing about him which had not
aged, and he should have let himself go with it....

Late that night, through wind and sharp rain-shower, Nicky came back,
with Jim, sleepy but unhurt and full of his adventure, before him on the
horse. Archelaus and the child had been found wandering on the moor by
Botallack mine, now long disused; Jim was crying with hunger and alarm
and the old man babbling of the days when he had worked there. He was
trying to find one particular shaft to show the child, he said. As it
was ruined, with an unguarded lip and a sheer drop in the darkness of
some five hundred feet, it was as well that the search for it had
failed. Archelaus was following with the doctor in his trap, said Nicky
briefly. He had seemed as though suddenly broken down, the doctor
thought, and would probably never recover. And, indeed, when Archelaus
was half-carried, half-helped, into the hall, he looked, save for the
two spots of colour on his high cheek-bones, like some huge old corpse
galvanised into a shocking semblance of life.

He was taken up to his room, the one with the four-poster bed in which
the old Squire had died, with the wide view of the rolling fields. And
there, it was soon plain, Archelaus would remain for what was left to
him of his earthly course.

CHAPTER III

THE LETTERS

A week later there was no doubt that Archelaus was dying. He had passed
the week only half-conscious--some spring both in the machinery of his
splendid old body and his brain seemed as though they had given way
together. He lay dying, and Ishmael, standing day by day beside the bed,
looking down on the seamed, battered, gnarled thing that lay th