“Well, yes, the misery that comes of malice, and if ever malice and misery were written in a man’s face, they were written in his yesterday when they missed those men. And mark me,” Jack added, raising his voice, “his damnation has got something to do with the loss of those men.” I was now getting very angry, so I rose to my feet and said hastily—“If we have nothing to talk about, don’t you think that we may as well go back?” Jack rose and said, “No, Bob, we’ll not go back yet awhile. Don’t be vexed with me, old fellow. You are in more danger than I am, but your danger is mine.” As he said this I saw the same expression on his face which I had seen yesterday, an expression of kindness and anxiety, and it had much the same effect on me now. “Jack,” I said, “forgive me, I declare I believe you are partly right; I believe there is some devilish influence at work trying to set me against you. I caught myself yesterday despising you for not being clever, and there were two devils in that, for you are twice as clever as I am, and even if you were not you are ten times as good.” “Ah, Bob, my boy, there is plenty of reason to suspect me of stupidity without supposing that the devil is in the dance. ‘Nec deus (or diabolus) intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus.’ You see I have a stock verse or two to quote at a pinch. But although I don’t see as far, perhaps, into the game as you, it may be that just for that reason I see the near points a little more clearly. Now sit down again and tell me what you think of it all.” We didn’t sit but kept walking up and down. “I don’t know what to think,” I said; “I was nearly sure yesterday that I was either mad or dreaming, but I have given over thinking that. I suppose there is a desperate and widely spread conspiracy against civilised society, and that these men are in it. You talk about fee-faw-fum, but I remembered some things yesterday while we were in that car that made me feel as if the whole world were nothing but what you call fee-faw-fum.” “What were they, Bob?” I told him all that I have written in the first two chapters of this book. He listened most attentively, and made me repeat two or three times over parts of the conversation between the two doctors. But when I wound up my story by telling him that I had recognised James Redpath among the men on the platform, he stopped suddenly, turned right round and looked at me. “Good heavens!” he said. And then after a pause, “Do you think that you saw him carried away that morning from your Welsh village?” “I didn’t see him, but I have little doubt that I saw the shadow of the car in which he was carried away.” “Do you think that we have stumbled on your friend Dr. Leopold’s non-human intelligence? and that there is a manufactory of black death or plague somewhere in the neighbourhood?”