With this the earl repaired to the drawing-room, where he made the excuses for Hopkins and Lord Barncastle. Toppleton and the butler carried the prostrate Barncastle up to his room, and then the American, utterly worn out with excitement, entered his own apartments to await developments. CHAPTER XV. BARNCASTLE CONFIDES IN HOPKINS. TOPPLETON had not long to wait. His nerves had hardly resumed their normal condition when he heard a tottering step in the hall outside, followed by a soft tapping at the door. "Who's there?" he cried. "It is I, Toppleton--Barncastle. Let me in and be quick. I have something very important to say to you." Hopkins ran to the door and opened it, and Barncastle entered, his face pale and his general aspect that of a man who had passed through a terrible ordeal. "By Jove! I've landed my man!" said Toppleton to himself. Then he added aloud, "My dear Barncastle, you don't know what a turn you gave me downstairs. I sincerely hope you are not ill?" "I am ill, Toppleton; ill almost unto death, and it is you who have made me so." "I?" cried Hopkins, with well-feigned surprise. "I don't quite catch your drift." "Your accursed faculty for reading character in the face, and searching out the soul of man in the depths of his eyes has made you the only man I have ever feared. We must come to some understanding in this matter. I want to know what your object is in coming here to expose me before my friends, to lay bare--" "Object? What is my object?" returned Hopkins, with capital dissemblance. "Why, my dear fellow, what object could I have? I read your face and searched your eyes for indications of your character at your own request, and with your permission made known what I saw there--for it is there, Barncastle, plain as any material object in this room." "It is dreadful! dreadful!" said Barncastle, covering his eyes with his hands and quivering with emotion and fear. "I had no idea your power was so great. Do you suppose for an instant that had I known how unerringly accurate you are as a reader of mind and face, that I would ever have asked you to lay bare to those people--" "Dear me, Barncastle," said Toppleton, rising and putting his hand on the other's shoulder in a caressing manner, "really you ought to lie down and rest. This thing will all pass off with a night's sleep. You--you don't seem to be quite yourself to-night. You mustn't mind what I have said." "You do not know, Toppleton, you do not know. You have done that to-night which has shown me that a dreadful secret which I have carried locked in my breast for thirty years, is as easily to be wrested from me by you as my jewels by a house-breaker."