table, and Turold heard him tell the story to a friend one night at dinner.  It had happened just like that—­quite simply, but it was a possibility I had overlooked.  Not that it mattered, as it happened, but it would have—­if Alice had been with him.  Turold, of course, kept his knowledge to himself.  He was too cautious to approach the passenger, but he instructed his lawyer to make guarded inquiries at the shipping office of the vessel in order to verify the story.  Then he returned home, consumed by anxiety, no doubt, to wait for my reappearance.  As the months slipped past and I did not appear, hope revived within him.  It appears that he had heard the passenger say that I was a wreck—­a physical wreck.  That must have been a cheering item in a bad piece of news.  I can imagine its growing importance in Turold’s mind as the time went on and I made no sign.  Finally (and thankfully) he reached the conclusion that I was indeed dead, and that he had nothing more to fear.  There was an element of uncertainty about it, though, a lack of definite knowledge.  I fancy that was one of the reasons which led him to take Thalassa into his service when he turned up some time later.  It was a deep and subtle thing to do.  Thalassa was bound to help him against me, if ever I came back.

“The years went on, and he grew quite certain, as any man in his position would, in the circumstances.  He forgot all about me.  That frame of mind lasted until he came to Cornwall, and then, it seemed, I came back into his life in the strangest way.  I haunted him in the spirit, and he never once guessed that I might be there in the flesh.  Who can explain this?

“As he spoke of it he looked as though he had a grievance against me, as, perhaps, he had—­from his point of view.  ’You faded from my mind for twenty years,’ he said.  ’But here—­in Cornwall—­your memory began to haunt me.  It was your footsteps, principally.  I used to fancy you were following me across the moors.  Tonight for the first time I actually heard them—­heard them above the noise of the storm.  They came to my ears clear and sharp, around the house, on the rocks, under the window.’  He cast on me an appalled, a hopeless glance.  ‘Why have you left it so long?’ he cried.  ‘What do you want—­now?’

“He positively had no glimmering of my feelings.  His fixed idea, like a cancerous growth, had sucked all the healthy life out of him.  Hot anger stirred within me again, but I retained control of myself this time.  I asked him how he had found out about the earlier marriage, and he told me Alice had babbled something in her delirium—­enough to arouse his suspicions.  It seemed that he had waited for one of her lucid intervals, and wormed the truth out of her.  ’The proofs—­of course you’ve obtained them?’ I asked casually.  Yes, he had the proofs.  He had sent to London for them immediately.  I asked him where they were.  ’What do you want to know for?’ he asked in an agitated voice.  I told him quite