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“Another thing remains in my mind from that escape–namely, the sudden sharp reminder that I had not paid my bill, and the decision I made, standing there on the dusty highroad, that the small baggage I had left behind would more than settle for my indebtedness.

“For the rest, I can only tell you that I got coffee and bread at a cafe on the outskirts of this town I had come to, and soon after found my way to the station and caught a train later in the day. That same evening I reached London.”

“And how long altogether,” asked John Silence quietly, “do you think you stayed in the town of the adventure?”

Vezin looked up sheepishly.

“I was coming to that,” he resumed, with apologetic wrigglings of his body. “In London I found that I was a whole week out in my reckoning of time. I had stayed over a week in the town, and it ought to have been September 15th,–instead of which it was only September 10th!”

“So that, in reality, you had only stayed a night or two in the inn?” queried the doctor.

Vezin hesitated before replying. He shuffled upon the mat.

“I must have gained time somewhere,” he said at length–“somewhere or somehow. I certainly had a week to my credit. I can’t explain it. I can only give you the fact.”

“And this happened to you last year, since when you have never been back to the place?”

“Last autumn, yes,” murmured Vezin; “and I have never dared to go back. I think I never want to.”

“And, tell me,” asked Dr. Silence at length, when he saw that the little man had evidently come to the end of his words and had nothing more to say, “had you ever read up the subject of the old witchcraft practices during the Middle Ages, or been at all interested in the subject?”

“Never!” declared Vezin emphatically. “I had never given a thought to such matters so far as I know–“

“Or to the question of reincarnation, perhaps?”

“Never–before my adventure; but I have since,” he replied significantly.

There was, however, something still on the man’s mind that he wished to relieve himself of by confession, yet could only with difficulty bring himself to mention; and it was only after the sympathetic tactfulness of the doctor had provided numerous openings that he at length availed himself of one of them, and stammered that he would like to show him the marks he still had on his neck where, he said, the girl had touched him with her anointed hands.

He took off his collar after infinite fumbling hesitation, and lowered his shirt a little for the doctor to see. And there, on the surface of the skin, lay a faint reddish line across the shoulder and extending a little way down the back towards the spine. It certainly indicated exactly the position an arm might have taken in the act of embracing. And on the other side of the neck, slightly higher up, was a similar mark, though not quite so clearly defined.

“That was where she held me that night on the ramparts,” he whispered, a strange light coming and going in his eyes.

* * * * *

It was some weeks later when I again found occasion to consult John Silence concerning another extraordinary case that had come under my notice, and we fell to discussing Vezin’s story. Since hearing it, the doctor had made investigations on his own account, and one of his secretaries had discovered that Vezin’s ancestors had actually lived for generations in the very town where the adventure came to him. Two of them, both women, had been tried and convicted as witches, and had been burned alive at the stake. Moreover, it had not been difficult to prove that the very inn where Vezin stayed was built about 1700 upon the spot where the funeral pyres stood and the executions took place. The town was a sort of headquarters for all the sorcerers and witches of the entire region, and after conviction they were burnt there literally by scores.