Yet it was a world no newer to him relatively than when he had last left it a double decade ago. He had not awakened like Rip Van Winkle to the repossession of his own. It was England the strange island which, in those far-distant days, he had scarcely crossed the Channel to see, and exploit, before he had been caught into the toils of its inexplicable laws, and put away to rage out his heart in an age-long confinement for a crime which he had never committed. Once, he recalled, he had been an astute Piedmontese rascal, a guide and porter at an hotel in the High Alps, who had suddenly, in bad times, elected to travel, with the purpose to sell to a certain person a certain secret, of which Fortune had made him the possessor. That was all done with; only the sense of the blood-lust, of the inherent vendetta, existed to identify him with that old Antonio Geoletti. For the rest, he had seen so little of this England, that a twenty years’ hiatus in its history made no difference to him whatever. It was no stranger to him now than it had been then. He had found useful compatriots in it; he would find them, or others like them, again. One or two he had encountered in the course of his long punishment. He had their approximate addresses, and the addresses of a score of English “pals”--scoundrels, whose sympathies had naturally gravitated towards one who had not only been imprisoned for breaking the law, but who had broken over and over again the laws of imprisonment. But he did not need these at present. One and all he dismissed them from his mind. To seek any out would be, he knew, to attract the attention of the police to himself. And he desired only to steal away and be forgotten--to pursue, unobserved and unsuspected, the single deadly purpose which haunted his soul. White, haggard, unmanned in all else but this, he might, as he stole on his way, have passed for the very personification of an inhuman Nemesis. In his hugging and caressing of his monomania, it occurred to him presently that Fate had at least vouchsafed to him one compensation for his sufferings. They had disguised him effectively from recognition by his enemies. Who would think to identify this grizzled time-worn beast with the vigorous rogue who had been haled from the dock to a living death? He wondered sometimes that his enemies had never foreseen this crisis to their villainy--late, but inevitable in its arrival. Yet perhaps they had foreseen it, and calculated contemptuously upon the thousand possible accidents of time, or at least upon the taming influence of penal servitude. If that were so, that were well. He would not for all the world have his purpose suspected or provided against. Craft--a patient, unsleeping, unobtrusive craft--must guide all his footsteps henceforth.