I looked, and saw half hidden by a small belt of brushwood, a group of officers, and I could hear them laughing. 'Is that an Indian cry, Springfield?' some one said. 'Yes, there's a legend that it is always heard the night before there's a kind of vendetta.' Springfield's voice reached us quite clearly, and I looked instinctively towards Paul Edgecumbe. 'I know that voice! I know it!' and the intensity of his feeling was manifested in every word he spoke. 'Silence,' I whispered, 'and come with me, quickly!' I drew him to a spot from which, without being observed, he could see Springfield's face. 'That is he, _that's_ he,' he whispered hoarsely. 'I know him,--I know him!' 'Who is he?' I asked. 'I--oh!--no,--I don't know.' From pain, almost amounting to agony, the expression on his face had changed to that of intense loathing, of infinite contempt. 'Let's get away,' he said; 'this air is polluted.' A few minutes later, we had come to the rest-house where I had been brought after my shaking-up, and I saw that the letters had come. 'Wait a minute,' I said. 'I want to hear the end of your story.' There was only one letter for me, and I saw at a glance that it had come from Lorna Bolivick. It was a long, newsy epistle, only one part of which I need quote here. It referred to Paul Edgecumbe's photograph. 'Thank you,' she wrote, 'for sending me that picture of your protege. What a strange-looking man! I don't think I ever saw a face quite like it before, and hasn't he wonderful eyes! I felt, even while looking at it, that he was reading my very soul. I am sure he has had wonderful experiences, and has seen things undreamed of by such as I. I had a kind of feeling, when I asked you for it, that I might have met him, or seen him somewhere; but I never have. His face is like no other I have ever seen, although, in spite of its strangeness, it is wonderfully striking. If ever you have a chance, you must bring him to see me. I am sure I should like to talk to him. A man who has a face like that couldn't help being interesting.' Here was the final blow which shattered all my suspicions. In spite of repeated assurances to the contrary, I retained the impression that Paul Edgecumbe and Maurice St. Mabyn were the same person. Now I knew that it was impossible. Lorna Bolivick's testimony was final, all the more final because she had no thought of what was in my own mind. And yet I knew that Paul Edgecumbe was in some way associated with Springfield and St. Mabyn; everything pointed to that fact. Springfield's evident fear, St. Mabyn's anxiety, added to Edgecumbe's strange behaviour when he heard the peculiar cry, and saw Springfield's face, made me sure that in some way these men's lives were bound together, in a way I could not understand. CHAPTER XII THE STRUGGLE ON THE SOMME