Such were the arguments of that Voice of the river, the old, familiar arguments of desolation and despair.  I leant over the parapet; in another moment I should have been gone, when I became aware that some one was standing near to me.  I did not see the person because it was too dark.  I did not hear him because of the raving of the wind.  But I knew that he was there.  So I waited until the moon shone out for a while between the edges of two ragged clouds, the shapes of which I can see to this hour.  It showed me Jorsen, looking just as he does to-day, for he never seems to change—­Jorsen, on whom, to my knowledge, I had not set eyes before.

“Even a year ago,” he said, in his strong, rough voice, “you would not have allowed your mind to be convinced by such arguments as those which you have just heard in the Voice of the river.  That is one of the worst sides of drink; it decays the reason as it does the body.  You must have noticed it yourself.”

I replied that I had, for I was surprised into acquiescence.  Then I grew defiant and asked him what he knew of the arguments which were or were not influencing me.  To my surprise—­no, that is not the word—­to my bewilderment, he repeated them to me one by one just as they had arisen a few minutes before in my heart.  Moreover, he told me what I had been about to do, and why I was about to do it.

“You know me and my story,” I muttered at last.

“No,” he answered, “at least not more than I know that of many men with whom I chance to be in touch.  That is, I have not met you for nearly eleven hundred years.  A thousand and eighty-six, to be correct.  I was a blind priest then and you were the captain of Irene’s guard.”

At this news I burst out laughing and the laugh did me good.

“I did not know I was so old,” I said.

“Do you call that old?” answered Jorsen.  “Why, the first time that we had anything to do with each other, so far as I can learn, that is, was over eight thousand years ago, in Egypt before the beginning of recorded history.”

“I thought that I was mad, but you are madder,” I said.

“Doubtless.  Well, I am so mad that I managed to be here in time to save you from suicide, as once in the past you saved me, for thus things come round.  But your rooms are near, are they not?  Let us go there and talk.  This place is cold and the river is always calling.”

That was how I came to know Jorsen, whom I believe to be one of the greatest men alive.  On this particular night that I have described he told me many things, and since then he has taught me much, me and a few others.  But whether he is what is called a Mahatma I am sure I do not know.  He has never claimed such a rank in my hearing, or indeed to be anything more than a man who has succeeded in winning a knowledge of his own powers out of the depths of the dark that lies behind us.  Of course I mean out of his past in other incarnations long before he was Jorsen.  Moreover, by degrees, as I grew fit to bear the light, he showed me something of my own, and of how the two were intertwined.