Soolsby stared at him almost blindly for a moment. A mist was before his eyes; but through the mist, though he saw nothing of this scene in which he now was, he saw the laboratory, and himself and Eglington, and Eglington’s face as it peered at him, and, just before the voice called outside, Eglington’s eyes fastened on his hand. It all flashed upon him now, and he saw himself starting back at the sound of the voice. Slowly he got up now, went to the door, and opened it. “My lord, it is not true,” he said. “You have not spoken like a gentleman. It was my lady’s voice that saved me. This is my castle, my lord--you lodge yonder.” He pointed down into the darkness where the lights of the village shone. “I owe you nothing. I pay my debts. Pay yours, my lord, to him that’s beyond and away.” Eglington kept his countenance as he drew on his great-coat and slowly passed from the house. “I ought to have let you die, Soolsby. Y’ou’ll think better of this soon. But it’s quite right to leave the matter to me. It may take a little time, but everything will come right. Justice shall be done. Well, good night, Soolsby. You live too much alone, and imagination is a bad thing for the lonely. Good night-good night.” Going down the hill quickly, he said to himself: “A sort of second sight he had about that wire. But time is on my side, time and the Soudan--and ‘The heathen in his blindness....’ I will keep what is mine. I will keep it!” CHAPTER XXVII. THE AWAKENING In her heart of hearts Hylda had not greatly welcomed the Duchess of Snowdon to Hamley. There was no one whose friendship she prized more; but she was passing through a phase of her life when she felt that she was better apart, finding her own path by those intuitions and perceptions which belonged to her own personal experience. She vaguely felt, what all realise sooner or later, that we must live our dark hours alone. Yet the frank downright nature of the once beautiful, now faded, Duchess, the humorous glimmer in the pale-blue eyes, the droll irony and dry truth of her speech, appealed to Hylda, made her smile a warm greeting when she would rather have been alone. For, a few days before, she had begun a quest which had absorbed her, fascinated her. The miner, finding his way across the gap of a reef to pick up the vein of quartz at some distant and uncertain point, could not have been more lost to the world than was the young wife searching for a family skeleton, indefinitely embodied in her imagination by the name, James Fetherdon.