"What things we may become! If ever there was blood money, this is it. And I'm a Beaupré. And do you know, Townsend, that for ever so long I've been dreaming dreams." He looked up at me, with a sudden flashing of his eyes. "Dreams of Dora Jardine." I turned again to the fire--smiling in my turn. "You told me so before." "But I never told you what sort of dreams I had been dreaming. I never told you how she fills all my veins till, in all the world, I see nothing, think of nothing else, but her. I never told you how she is with me by day and by night, sleeping and waking; that, wherever I am, and whatever I do, I am always repeating to myself her name. I never told you that the dreams which I have dreamed of her have driven me mad. I never told you that." "With all due respect to you, I should hardly have believed you if you had." "Why? Because I am the thing I am? There's the pity of it! I have been so conscious of my unworthiness, so conscious that I never could be worthy, that, constrained by some madness which I verily believe is in my blood, I have become more unworthy still." He came closer to me. His voice dropped to a sort of breathless whisper. "And yet, Reggie, do you know, I believe that, in spite of all, she cares for me." "I think not." He became, all at once, almost ferocious. "You think not! What right have you to think? How can you tell what grounds I may have for my belief?" I turned to him. I had purposely kept my back towards him while he had been indulging in his hysterical ravings. Now I was surprised and amused to see what a change his hysterics had produced. His cheeks were flushed. His eyes were flaming. He seemed to have increased in stature. He seemed to have lost all traces of the hang-dog air with which he had entered the room. "I ought, Archie, to have stopped you. If I remember rightly I did stop you on a previous occasion. I have, I assure you, good cause for thinking that your belief is an erroneous one; that cause is, that I have reason to believe that she cares for me." "For you--Reggie!" "I will be frank with you. With her father's express approval I am going down to Cockington to-day in the character of Miss Jardine's suitor." "You!--My God!" "Very shortly I hope to receive your congratulations on the confessedly undeserved good fortune which has dowered me with such a wife." "But"--the man was trembling so that he could scarcely speak--"you're--you're a murderer." "I am as you will shortly be. Let us hope that my man is not listening to these plain truths. What then?" He began fumbling in his waistcoat pocket. "I won't have your money. You can't buy me body and soul--no, not altogether. She shall know what manner of man you are." He threw my cheque from him on to the floor.