He got up, and took her tenderly in his arms again, to say good-bye. “It won’t be long, little mother,” he said, “before I come again to you, and take my place in my father’s home. But, for the present, I want you to swear to me—to swear to me on something you love well—that you will not betray my secret. Betty—for the love of your boy—swear to me that you will not betray me—will not take from me the love of the woman who is more to me than anything else in the wide world. Swear to me!” With tears in her honest old eyes, she drew his head down, and kissed him. “I’ll swear to you, Phil,” she said—“by that!” He ran out into the darkness, and left her standing, in the light of the candle, in the little parlour. CHAPTER XV THE SHADY ’UN AS A MORAL CHARACTER It must be confessed that Mr. Ogledon—better known, in some shady circles, as “The Count”—was in an awkward situation. For a whole week, he had secretly congratulated himself on the fact that his unfortunate cousin Dandy Chater was safely out of the way; moreover, he had carefully rehearsed the part he was to play, when first told of Dandy’s disappearance; had decided how best to show his pain and indignation, and his determination to hunt down the mystery, and find the murderer. In a word, he had carefully arranged so that no possible suspicion should fall upon himself; and now he discovered—to his consternation—that all these precautions were unnecessary, and that some ghastly replica of the murdered man had taken his place, and was accepted, by all and sundry as the genuine man. It must be said at once, that Ogledon, having no knowledge of the real story, and goaded by his own guilty conscience, found no solution in his mind of the mystery in any practical form. He saw, in this creature who had sprung up in the likeness of the man whose life had been brutally beaten out of him, only something horrible and intangible, come straight from the Land of Shadows, to mock at him, and drive him to distraction. If, on that lonely river bank, at the dead of night, the victim he had struck down lifeless had suddenly risen up in full vigour, unharmed and smiling, the murderer could not have been more appalled than he was by this quiet acceptance, by every one, of the figure which had stared through the window at him from the terrace of Chater Hall. Never for an instant suspecting the presence of the second man, that solution of the mystery did not occur to him; he saw in this Dandy Chater, risen from the grave, only his own embodied conscience, come to haunt and terrify him. He remained that night in the dining-room with the Doctor; fearing to go to bed, or to be left alone for a moment. And, as the Doctor, whenever he got the opportunity, applied himself assiduously to the consumption of neat brandy, Mr. Ogledon as the time drew on towards morning, found himself pretty fully occupied in shaking his companion, and keeping him awake.