"Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight. I saw him over your shoulder."

     "Steady!" I thought. I asked him then, "Which of the two do you suppose you saw?"

     "The one who had been mauled," he answered readily, "and I'll swear I saw him! The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him."

     "This is very curious!" said I, with the best assumption I could put on of its being nothing more to me. "Very curious indeed!"

     I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson's having been behind me "like a ghost." For if he had ever been out of my thoughts for a few moments together since the hiding had begun, it was in those very moments when he was closest to me; and to think that I should be so unconscious and off my guard after all my care was as if I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had found him at my elbow. I could not doubt, either, that he was there, because I was there, and that, however slight an appearance of danger there might be about us, danger was always near and active.