Page:Quiller-Couch--Old fires and profitable ghosts.djvu/313

Rh slipped behind a gravestone, and when Dick gave up the search, he broke cover and fled inland. He changed his name: let this be his excuse, he had neither wife nor child. The man knew something of gardening: he had a couple of pounds and some odd shillings in his pocket—enough to take him to one of the big midland towns—Wolverhampton, I think—where he found work as a jobbing gardener. But something of the fascination which had held him lurking about Lansulyan, drove him to Cressingham, which—he learned from the newspaper accounts of the wreck—was Colonel Stanhope's country seat. Or perhaps he had some vague idea that Heaven would grant him a chance to make amends. You understand now how the little Felicia became his idol. "At Lansulyan he had but two desires. The first was to live until he had saved as many lives as his carelessness had lost in the Nerbuddha. For it was nothing worse, but mere forgetfulness to change the course: one of those dreadful lapses of memory which baffle all Board of Trade inquiry. You may light, and buoy, and beacon every danger along the coast, and still you leave that small kink in the skipper's brain which will cast away a ship for all your care. The second of his desires you have helped me to fulfil. He wished in death to be John Murchison again, and lie where his ship lies: lie with his grand error atoned for. John Emmet needs no gravestone: for John Emmet lived