I laughed as though this were some great game he was playing; I got up and went to the looking-glass. Staring into it I saw a worn lined face, with the eyes of a tired old man set in it, and crowned with grey hair. I had not seen myself in a mirror for all those years; I looked into the startled old face of a man of sixty at least. Realizing for the first time a little who I was, and what I was--and understanding perhaps the tragedy of what I had been--I turned away, sick at heart and afraid, and looked at him. He was still seated there, with his elbows on the table, and with that grim smile hovering about his lips. "You're an old, old man," he sneered, "of no use to any one in the world, and of no use to yourself. Your life is a thing of the past, and you can't begin again now. What are you going to do--how will you live?" I told him that I did not know; he seemed so much stronger than I was, and so much more accustomed to the big world in which I was expected to move, that I begged him to help me if he would, and to show me what I should do. I was so much a child, after that long burial to which I had been subjected, that I could not think for myself; indeed it never occurred to me to ask how this man came to know my name, or why he had met me at the prison gates. "I mean to look after you," he assured me. "You shall live again, Charles Avaline; you shall take up your life where you thought once you had laid it down. You have been snatched from death; you shall come out into the world with me again; you shall come into your kingdom!" I went with him placidly enough when presently we left the inn, and set off through the town. If you wonder that I should have submitted myself so readily to him, I ask you to remember the life I had lived, and the fear in which I stood of this great world that was closing about me. I was to have the past brought back to me fully and strongly, but I did not know that then; I was to live again, in another way, the life I once had lived, and to understand it in a new fashion. We came to a railway station, and my companion took a ticket for London; he seemed to understand that I had my pass from the prison--in fact, he asked me for it. The station master at the little place looked at me queerly, but I think he was used to poor prisoners who came to him with Government slips of paper to take them to various parts of the kingdom. He shut us into a third-class carriage alone together, and we started for London. And on the way, strangely enough, my companion raked over that long buried past of mine, and reminded me who I was, and what I was. I remember that I cowered before him, as I might have cowered before a judge who knew my record, and was passing sentence upon me. "Charles Avaline, twenty years ago you killed a man," he began.