Ward actually turned pale, and the doctor was the first to speak. "More," he said, "has been found out, and I must warn you fairly that a reckoning is due."
"Digging again, and coming upon more poor starving pets?" was the ironic reply. It was evident that the youth meant to show bravado to the last.
"No," Willett slowly rejoined, "this time I did not have to dig. We have had men looking up Dr. Allen, and they found the false beard and spectacles in the bungalow"
"Excellent," commented the disquieted host in an effort to be wittily insulting, "and I trust they proved more becoming than the beard and glasses you now have on!"
"They would become you very well," came the even and studied response, "as indeed they seem to have done."
As Willett said this, it almost seemed as though a cloud passed over the sun; though there was no change in the shadows on the floor. Then Ward ventured:
"And is this what asks so hotly for a reckoning? Suppose a man does find it now and then useful to be twofold?"
"No," said Willett gravely, "again you are wrong. It is no business of mine if any man seeks duality; provided he has any right to exist at all, and provided he does not destroy what called him out of space."
Ward now started violently. "Well, Sir, what have ye found, and what d'ye want with me?"
The doctor let a little time elapse before replying, as if choosing his words for an effective answer.
"I have found," he finally intoned, "something in a cupboard behind an ancient overmantel where a picture once was, and I have burned it and buried the ashes where the grave of Charles Dexter Ward ought to be."
The madman choked and sprang from the chair in which he had been sitting:
"Damn ye, who did ye tell—and who'll believe it was he after these full two months, with me alive? What d'ye mean to do?"
Willett, though a small man, actually took on a kind of judicial majesty as he calmed the patient with a gesture.
"I have told no one. This is no common case—it is a madness out of time and a horror from beyond the spheres which no police or lawyers or courts or alientists could ever fathom or grapple with. Thank God some chance has left inside me the spark of imagination, that I might not go astray in thinking out
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