to his mania its special turn, to his
delusion its monstrous (but, as Doctor Mary was aware, by no means
unprecedented) character. By the time of his meeting with Beaumaroy the
delusion was complete; through all the second half of 1918 he
followed--so far as his mind could now follow anything rationally--in his
own person and fortunes the fate of the man whom he believed himself to
be, appropriating the hopes, the fears, the imagined ambitions, the
physical infirmity, of that self-created other self.

But he wrapped it all in deep secrecy, for, as the conviction of his true
identity grew complete, his fears were multiplied. Radbolts indeed! The
whole of Christendom--Principalities and Powers--were on his track. They
would shut him up, kill him perhaps! Cunningly he hid his secret--save
what could not be entirely hidden, the physical deformity. But he hid it
with his shawl; he never ate out of his own house; the combination
knife-and-fork was kept sedulously hidden. Only to Beaumaroy did he
reveal the hidden thing; and, later, on Beaumaroy's persuasion, he let
into the portentous secret one faithful servant--Beaumaroy's unsavory
retainer, Sergeant Hooper.

He never accepted Hooper as more than a distasteful necessity--somebody
must wait on him and do him menial service; he was not feared, indeed,
for surely such a dog would not dare to be false, but cordially disliked.
Beaumaroy won him from the beginning. Whom he conceived him to be
Beaumaroy himself never knew, but he opened his heart to him
unreservedly. Of him he had no suspicion; to him he looked for safety and
for the realization of his cherished dreams. Beaumaroy soothed his
terrors and humored him in all things--what was the good of doing
anything else, asked Beaumaroy's philosophy. He loved Beaumaroy far more
than he had loved anybody except himself in all his life. At the end,
through the wild tangle of mad imaginings, there ran this golden thread
of human affection; it gave the old man hours of peace, sometimes almost
of sanity.

So he came to his death, directly indeed of a long-standing organic
disease, yet veritably self-destroyed. And so he sat now, dead amidst his
shabby parody of splendor. He had done with thrones; he had even done
with Tower Cottage--unless indeed his pale shade were to hold nocturnal
converse with the robust and flamboyant ghost of Captain Duggle; the one
vaunting his unreal vanished greatness, mouthing orations and mimicking
pomp;