“But I knew of yours,” answered the storekeeper. “Your agent hath an annoying trick of speech, and the overseers have caught it from him. ‘Your master’ this, and ‘your master’ that; in short, for ten years it hath been, ‘Work, you dog, that your master may play!’ Well, I have worked; it was that, or killing myself, or going mad. I have worked for you in the fields, in the smithy, in this close room. But when you bought my body, you could not buy my soul. Day after day, and night after night, I sent it away; I would not let it bide in these dull levels, in this cursed land of heat and stagnant waters. At first it went home to its own country,--to its friends and its foes, to the torrent and the mountain and the music of the pipes; but at last the pain outweighed the pleasure, and I sent it there no more. And then it began to follow you.” “To follow me!” involuntarily exclaimed Haward. “I have been in London,” went on the other, without heeding the interruption. “I know the life of men of quality, and where they most resort. I early learned from your other servants, and from the chance words of those who had your affairs in charge, that you were young, well-looking, a man of pleasure. At first when I thought of you the blood came into my cheek, but at last I thought of you constantly, and I felt for you a constant hatred. It began when I knew that Ewin Mackinnon was dead. I had no need of love; I had need of hate. Day after day, my body slaving here, my mind has dogged your footsteps. Up and down, to and fro, in business and in pleasure, in whatever place I have imagined you to be, there have I been also. Did you never, when there seemed none by, look over your shoulder, feeling another presence than your own?” He ceased to speak, and the hand upon the cask was still. The sunshine was clean gone from the room, and without the door the wind in the locust-tree answered the voice of the river. Haward rose from his seat, but made no further motion toward departing. “You have been frank,” he said quietly. “Had you it in mind, all this while, so to speak to me when we should meet?” “No,” answered the other. “I thought not of words, but of”-- “But of deeds,” Haward finished for him. “Rather, I imagine, of one deed.”