It was here that a strange hallucination took possession of him, and one he had some little difficulty to stifle. Suddenly, and without warning, he thought that he heard Luton Delayne’s voice from one of the inner rooms; but when he entered it there was no sign of occupation whatever, no evidence that it had been used for many months. This should have set his mind at rest, but no such result followed upon the discovery. For the second time he heard the voice calling him from another quarter of the house; and, refusing to believe that he could be mistaken a second time, he crossed the narrow hall, and entered the room he had used as his study. Here at last were those visible evidences of occupation he had sought vainly elsewhere. The remains of such a meal as a man would have ordered were still upon the table. A fire burned in the grate, and a flask of red wine stood upon a side table. Whoever had occupied this room had left it during the day, and, what was more, he had written a letter shortly before he left. Benny set down the candle upon the side table, and knelt to warm himself before the fire, upon which he heaped fresh logs. The window showed him the broad expanse of the lake with the mountains upon the far side of it, and the star cluster of Magadino at their feet. A man of indomitable courage, he was astonished to discover how greatly the hallucination of the voice had shaken him, and how real it had seemed when it called him. He had never realised the remoteness of the shanty before, nor its isolation from the towns by the lakeside. Presently a fit of shivering seized him, and he started up fearing that he was about to be ill, and determined that his will should master the situation. He heaped up the logs until the fire roared in the chimney, and then searching the kitchen for candles made such an illumination as that little room had never witnessed before. The light cheered him—he drank what was left of the wine in the flask, and ate of the bread and butter upon the table. He had pipe and tobacco, and these had ever been his good friends in every kind of emergency. A long smoke by the fireside cleared his brain of the cobwebs, and gave him a clearer vision. And first he said that Luton had left the house, and it was doubtful if he would return. Had it been otherwise, had he gone across to dine at one of the neighbouring towns, assuredly the beldame would have returned to her kitchen by this time and made her preparations for the night. So it was clear that Delayne had left the shanty, and that he, Benny, had come too late. Whether this were a good thing or a bad he had as yet no means of knowing. The darker suggestion that the man had been arrested by the police, and that the old woman had fled the shanty in consequence, was not to be put aside. That seemed a very likely thing to have happened; but if it had happened, he would hear of it soon enough, and so would every newspaper in Switzerland.