“My opportunity had come.  I went to the house and tried the front window.  It was unlocked, and yielded.  I got through, and went quickly upstairs.  A light was shining underneath the study door.  I opened it, and saw Robert Turold sitting at his table writing with his back towards me.

“At the sight of that atrocious scoundrel sitting there immersed in his shameful project against a woman I had loved, my self-control gave way utterly, completely.  I had intended to be calm, to reason with him, to exact my terms with a cold logical brain.  I did none of these things.  Without a word of warning, before he even knew I was in the room, I sprang on him, clutching him, shaking him in a blind insensate fury till my strength suddenly failed me and left me sick and giddy.

“‘I am Remington,’ I said—­’Jim Remington.’  I leaned against the table, panting and exhausted, looking at him.  His self-control was something to marvel at.  He just sat still, returning my look with cold motionless eyes, no doubt trying to discern the features of the man he had wronged through the film of age.  But in spite of his self-control I could see the grey pallor of fear creeping into his face, and he could not keep his lips from trembling.  Twice he essayed to speak, but his mouth refused to utter the words.  What he did say was strange to me, when he got it out at last.  ’I was right’—­I heard him whisper, almost to himself—­’I knew, I knew.’  He repeated those words several times.  It was then I saw that his self-control arose from the fact that although he was terrified he did not appear to be so greatly surprised.  Surprised he was, but not in the way I had expected.  His prime difficulty seemed to be to get out of his head the identity by which he had known me.  ‘You are Ravenshaw—­Dr. Ravenshaw,’ he said.  ‘How can you be Remington?’ He brought out this with an effort, like a man trying to shake off an unreasoning horror.

“I had expected him to face it out, to challenge me, perhaps deny all knowledge of my existence.  Instead, he merely sat there staring at me with an air of terrified realization, like a person gazing upon the dreadful materialization of an expected phantom.  I told him the truth in the fewest possible words, and he listened silently, never removing his eyes from me, the phantom of his past.  When I had finished he lay back in his chair, but his eyes stared up at me with a kind of dead look, like half-closed eyes in a coffin.  ‘I knew that you were rescued from the island,’ he said.  ’But I thought you were long since dead.’

“That statement surprised me.  I asked him how he had learned of it.  He told me it was through the medium of an overheard conversation in a London hotel nearly thirty years before.  He had gone up to town to see his lawyer, and one of the people at the hotel where he put up happened to be one of the passengers of the Erechtheus, the steamer which had rescued me.  The man sat at the next