And so Drumcarro House was once more, but with a deepened mystery and terror, left with its dead. Mr. Douglas did not leave his room all the evening. The call to supper made first by Marg’ret, then by Glendochart knocking cautiously at his door, produced only the response of a growl from within. No light was visible from under the door. No sound was heard in the room. To all appearance he remained without moving or even lighting his candle, until late at night his heavy step was heard going up stairs to bed. Without a light, that was the strangest thing of all to the keen but silent observers. There could be nothing on the master’s mind or he could never have sat all the evening through knowing what it was that lay in his wife’s room up stairs, without a light. They could not imagine indeed how in any circumstances Drumcarro, an old man, could have had anything to do with the death of Lord John, a young one, nor what reason there could be for seeking his death, yet an uneasy fear was in the air, and there was no one else who could be thought of. But that circumstance cleared him. Without a light no man could sit who had been instrumental in causing a man’s death, while that man lay dead in the same house. Glendochart, whose mind was disturbed by many miserable surmises, was comforted by this thought, though almost unconsciously to himself. And nobody knew what thoughts were going on in the dark in that closed room. They were not thoughts specially about Lord John. They were the bewildering circling of a mind suddenly driven into tragic self-consciousness, about the entire chapter of his life now perhaps about to be brought to an end. The sudden pang of the moment, his clutch upon his victim (his hand hurt him still from the strain, and still now and then he raised it to his mouth, to blow his hot breath upon it), the whirl of that figure through the air, came back at intervals like a picture placed before his eyes. But between those intervals there surged up all manner of things. Old scenes far off and gone, incidents that had taken place in the jungle and swamp, cries and sounds of the lash, and pistol shots all long over and forgotten. One face, not white like Lord John’s, but grey in its blackness, like ashes, came and wavered in the darkness before him more distinct than the others. No ghost, he had no faith in ghosts, nothing outside of him. Something within from which even if they should hang him he knew he would not get free. Lord John,--he thought very little of Lord John! And yet his hand hurt him, the picture would come back, and the scene re-enact itself before his eyes. Sometimes he dozed with his head in his hands. The chief thing was that he should not be disturbed, that no one should come in to question him, to interfere with his liberty, that night at least. That he should be quiet that night if nevermore. CHAPTER XXII.