"I will finish the work which I came to do. Then I will return." I had sat down on an easy-chair. I had crossed my legs, and was swinging my foot in the air. Old Haines stood glowering down at me, clenching his fists to hold his temper in. I looked him up and down. After all he was, every inch of him, a narrow-minded, cross-grained, hidebound New Englander. "You are more likely to see the inside of a prison if you don't take care. You know, they manage things differently upon this side. Jack Haines, let me speak to you a word in season--a candid word. It may do you good. You killed your wife; I do not mean legally, but you killed her all the same. A prolonged course of you would be sufficient to kill any wife." "Woman!" "You drove your daughter from you. So unwilling was she to have it known that she was connected with you, that she took her mother's name. She called herself Louise O'Donnel. Under that name she came to England. Conscious that, even underneath her mother's name, you might trace her out in England, she has changed her name again. Under that new name she is deliberately hiding herself away from you." "It is false." "It may be. It is but a surmise. But, as such, it is at least as much likely to be correct as yours." "She is dead." "You have not one jot or tittle of proof that she is anything of the kind." "I will have proof." He brought down his fist upon my pretty, fragile table with a crash. "I will have proof." "Don't destroy the furniture." "Furniture!" He glared at the inoffensive table as if he would have liked to have chopped it into firewood. "You should not anger me. I say that I will have proof. And I will have proof of who it is has murdered her. And I will find him, though he hides himself in the uttermost corners of the earth. And when I have found him I will have a quittance." "What do you mean by that?" "Do you not know what I mean? Have you known me so short a time that you should need to ask?" "Do you mean that, if there is anything in these wild dreams of yours, you will kill the man who has killed your girl?" He raised his hands above his head in a sort of paroxysm. "Like a dog." "Then let me tell you that you are treading the road which leads to the gallows. They manage things in their own way upon this side. Killing's murder here. And the more excuse you think you have the tighter you're likely to fit the rope about your neck." "The hemp has not been sown which shall hang me on an English gallows. Do you think I am afraid?" He gave me the creeps. Although it surpassed my powers to adequately explain the thing, I knew that he had a trick of seeing things which had taken place before they became known to other people. I had had unpleasant experience of it more than once. One might begin by laughing at what he called his dreams and his visions, but, in the end, the laugh was apt to be upon the other side.