“No use to put on your glasses now,” he said.  “I recognize ye, and I’ve seen that damned scar on your neck.”

He put the lamp back on the table, and his hand went towards his belt.  Ravenshaw understood the motion and checked it with a gesture.

“No need for that, either, Thalassa.  There are other things to think about.”

Thalassa’s hand dropped to his side.  “You’re right,” he muttered.  “Get on with your doctoring.”

“No—­not now,” answered Ravenshaw sadly.  “It’s no use.  She is dead.”

“Dead!” Thalassa stood overwhelmed.  Silently he surveyed the slight recumbent form on the couch, his moving lips seemed to be counting the drops which dripped from her clinging garments on to the carpet.  “Dead, did ye say?  Why, I carried her here—­brought her across the moors to you.”  His voice trembled.  “Can’t ye do nothing?”

“No—­not now.  It is too late.”

Thalassa’s eyes rested attentively on the other’s face.  Ravenshaw’s complete acquiescence in death as an unalterable fact stung his untutored feelings by its calmness.  “Dead!” he repeated fiercely.  “Then you’ve got that to pay for now—­Remington.”

“Pay?  Oh, yes, I’ll pay—­make payment in full,” was the reply, delivered with a bitter look.  “But not to you.”

“To think I shouldn’t a’ known ye!” Thalassa spoke like a man in a dream.

“After all these years?  After what I suffered alone on that island—­through you and Turold?  You’d hardly have known me if you’d met me six months afterwards instead of thirty years.  Robert Turold didn’t know me.  Nobody knew me.”

Thalassa’s eyes still dwelt upon him with the unwilling look of a man compelled to gaze upon an evocation of the dead.

“Where did you get to—­that night?” he quavered.  “I could a’ sworn—­could a’ taken Bible oath—­”

“That you and that other scoundrel had killed me?  I’ve no doubt.  But it so happened that I was saved—­miraculously and unfortunately.  I fell on to a projecting spur of stone or rock not far down, which caught and held me.  By the light of the moon I saw you come along the ridge to look for me.  You were almost close enough for me to push you into that infernal sulphur lake where you hoped I had gone.  You turned back in time—­fortunately for yourself.”

Thalassa kept his gaze upon him with the meditating intentness of one trying to learn anew a face so greatly altered by the awful changes of the years.  His great brown hands, hanging loosely at his sides, clenched and opened rapidly with a quickness of action which had something vaguely menacing in it.

“I know your eyes now,” he mumbled.  “With the glasses on, you’re different.  That’s why ye wore them, I suppose.  Turold heered ye that night you killed ’un.  He knew your footstep—­or thought he did.  I laughed at him.  A’ would to God A’mighty I’d hearkened to him, and then I might a’ catched you.  How did ye get away from the island?”