ng
out to the extreme end of the Point, where he would sit for hours gazing
upon the ocean before him. In addition to this, he grew morose and
uncertain in his temper toward the natives, and sometimes he would fall
asleep in the evenings on a sofa, and talk to himself at such a rate
while asleep that I would grow frightened and wake him, when he would
stare about him for a little until he gathered consciousness, and then
he would stagger off to bed to fall asleep again almost immediately.
Also, his hands trembled much, and he began to lose flesh. All this
troubled me, for his own sake as well as my own, and I resolved to ask
him to see the doctor of the next mail-steamer that came. With this
idea I went one day to the end of the Point, and found him in his usual
attitude, seated on the long grass, looking seaward. He did not hear me
approach, and when I spoke he started to his feet, and demanded fiercely
why I disturbed him. I replied, as mildly as I could, for I was rather
afraid of the glittering look that was in his eyes, that I wished to ask
him if he did not feel ill.

He regarded me with a steady but softened glance for a little, and then
said:

"My lad, I thank you for your trouble; but I want no doctor. Do you
think I'm looking ill?"

"Indeed you are," I answered, "ill and thin; and, do you know, I hear
you talk to yourself in your sleep nearly every night."

"What do I say?" he asked eagerly.

"That I cannot tell," I replied. "It is all rambling talk; the same
things over and over again, and nearly all about one person--Lucy."

"Boy!" he cried out, as if in pain, or as if something had touched him
to the quick, "sit you down, and I'll tell you why I think of her--she
was my wife."

He moved nearer to the edge of the cliff, and we sat down, almost over
the restless sea beneath us.

"She lives in my memory," he continued, speaking more to himself than
to me, and looking far out to the horizon, beneath which the setting
sun had begun to sink, "in spite of all I can do or think of to make
her appear base in my eyes. For she left me to go with another man--a
scoundrel. This was how it was," he added, quickly: "I married her, and
thought her as pure as a flower; but I could not take her to sea with
me because I was only the mate of a vessel, so I left her among her
own friends, in the village where she was born. In a little cottage by
herself I settled her, comfortable and happy as I thought. God! how
she