"Well, that's all right; but don't try that game again," he said. "You'll be landing some of us into difficulties, to say nothing of yourself, if you wander about in your present muddle-headed condition. Stay where you can be looked after, and do as you're told." I meekly promised that I would obey; I ventured presently, as we sat there with the table between us, to put a question or two about the past. "I want you to tell me," I said--"I want to know what has happened down at Hammerstone Market in all these years. You tell me that a new Barbara has grown up to take the place of the old, but what of the old one?" It was all absurd and impossible, and I was a poor shabby broken grey-haired man, to whom love should mean nothing; but my voice trembled as I asked the question. "Your old flame?" he sneered. "Dead these many years." "Dead!" I sprang to my feet and stared at him wildly; I remember that he hurriedly pushed his chair back as though to avoid me. "Dead!" "What is there to get excited about?" he cried. "She couldn't live for ever--and besides, she treated you none too well." "Dead!" I said again, for that thought had never occurred to me before. I had seen her always young and fresh and unchanged; the curious thing was that I seemed to see her so still, even though this other girl had grown up in her image. "And the new Barbara--the bit of a girl that our friend Murray Olivant is so interested in--is like the old Barbara come to life again," said Jervis Fanshawe, speaking as if to himself, and with his lips set in a straight bitter line. "I hate her!--I loathe the sight of her. She stands there"--in his excitement he had risen to his feet, and had flung one thin arm above his head--"with the same devilish childish beauty her mother had--that mother that laughed at me, and sent you to rot for twenty years in a prison. I tell you, Charlie"--he dropped into his chair again and leaned across the table, staring at me with wild eyes--"I tell you that I have lain behind a hedge down in that place where she lives--so close to her that I could have risen up and seized her, and crushed the life out of her before she could cry out. Yes--and with these hands!" "She never harmed you," I reminded him. "No, but she lives in the image of the woman who laughed at me, and set me aside as something not to be reckoned with. And I've waited, Charlie--by God!--I've waited!" I did not guess then what was in his mind; I did not realize that the deadly hatred of the man for the one woman he had failed to possess could pass on through all those years, and grow again, stronger for the waiting, and rise up stark and strong against the child. I had not understood that any man could live for that and that only; could wait in the snow outside my prison to seize me as an instrument ready to his hand. I did not even then understand the man. "The Barbara who died--the Barbara I loved," I said gently--"won't you tell me about her?"