"To keep a vow," the other answered; "how and why made I will not tell you."
"How did you escape?" Wolfenden asked abruptly.
"Probably because I didn't care whether I escaped or not," Felix replied, with a short, bitter laugh. "I stood behind some shrubs just inside the garden, and watched the hunt go by. Then I came out here and sat down."
"It all sounds very simple," said Wolfenden, a trifle sarcastically. "May I ask what you are going to do next?"
Felix's face so clearly intimated that he might not ask anything of the kind, or that if he did his curiosity would not be satisfied, that Wolfenden felt compelled to make some apology.
"Forgive me if I seem inquisitive, but I find the situation a little unusual. You were my guest, you see, and had it not been for my chance invitation you might not have met that man at all. Then again, had it not been for my interference he would have been dead now and you would have been in a fair way to be hanged."
Felix evinced no sign of gratitude for Wolfenden's intervention. Instead he said intensely,
"Well, really," Wolfenden protested, "I don't see why----" But Felix interrupted him.
"Yes, you are a fool," he repeated, "because you saved his life. He is an old man now. I wonder how many there have been in the course of his long life who desired to kill him? But no one--not one solitary human being--has ever befriended him or come to his rescue in time of danger without living to be sorry for it. And so it will be with you. You will live to be sorry for what you have done to-night; you will live to think it would have been far better for him to fall by my hand than for yourself to suffer at his. And you will wish passionately that you had let him die. Before heaven, Wolfenden, I swear that that is true."
The man was so much in earnest, his passion was so quietly intense, that Wolfenden against his will was more than half convinced. He was silent. He suddenly felt cold, and the buoyant elation of mind in which he had started homewards vanished, leaving him anxious and heavy, perhaps just a little afraid.
"I did what any man would do for any one else," he said, almost apologetically. "It was instinctive. As a matter of fact, that particular man is a perfect stranger to me. I have never seen him before and it is quite possible that I shall never see him again."