“Suicide!” he said slowly—­“I suspected it, and, this time, I followed close:  followed, to fight with death, which should have you.”

As I moved back from the edge of the precipice, and shook him from me, I marked the vacancy that glared even through the glaring triumph of his eye, and remembered how I had been warned against him at the hospital.

The mist was thickening again, but thickening now in clouds that parted and changed minute by minute, under the influence of the light behind them.  I had noticed these sudden transitions before, and knew them to be the signs which preceded the speedy clearing of the atmosphere.

When I looked up at the sky, Mannion stepped back a few paces, and pointed in the direction of the fishing-hamlet from which I had departed.

“Even in that remote place,” he said, “and among those ignorant people, my deformed face has borne witness against you, and Margaret’s death has been avenged, as I said it should.  You have been expelled as a pest and a curse, by a community of poor fishermen; you have begun to live your life of excommunication, as I lived mine.  Superstition!—­barbarous, monstrous superstition, which I found ready made to my use, is the scourge with which I have driven you from that hiding-place.  Look at me now!  I have got back my strength; I am no longer the sick refuse of the hospital.  Where you go, I have the limbs and the endurance to go too!  I tell you again, we are linked together for life; I cannot leave you if I would.  The horrible joy of hunting you through the world, leaps in my blood like fire!  Look! look out on those tossing waves.  There is no rest for them; there shall be no rest for you!”

The sight of him, standing close by me in that wild solitude; the hoarse sound of his voice, as he raised it almost to raving in his exultation over my helplessness; the incessant crashing of the sea on the outer rocks; the roaring of the tortured waters imprisoned in the depths of the abyss behind us; the obscurity of the mist, and the strange, wild shapes it began to take, as it now rolled almost over our heads—–­all that I saw, all that I heard, seemed suddenly to madden me, as Mannion uttered his last words.  My brain felt turned to fire; my heart to ice.  A horrible temptation to rid myself for ever of the wretch before me, by hurling him over the precipice at my feet, seized on me.  I felt my hands stretching themselves out towards him without my willing it—­if I had waited another instant, I should have dashed him or myself to destruction.  But I turned back in time; and, reckless of all danger, fled from the sight of him, over the rugged and perilous surface of the cliff.

The shock of a fall among the rocks, before I had advanced more than a few yards, partly restored my self-possession.  Still, I dared not look back to see if Mannion was following me, so long as the precipice behind him was within view.