. . all else was a weariness I must go back!

For long I fought it. I even went back to England with Gerard, my good
friend the Consul, who, if he still thought me mad, at least respected
my madness.

For he said nothing of my story to a soul, and he it was that piloted
me as a child through the new conditions of life that I found on all
sides in England; he helped me turn part of my diamonds into a large
fortune, he helped me at length and with reluctance, for he would
rather not have believed in the miracle of my long sleep to find proof
of all I had told him.

There came a day when we stood before the graves of my father and
mother, who had died years after I had left England died mourning me as
dead and from the lips of an old greybeard, who had been my schoolmate,
we heard how that scapegrace son of theirs had gone treasure-seeking
and had never returned all those years ago.

Poor old garrulous fool; he little knew that the deformed, but strong
and vigorous man that asked him of this companion of his youth was that
very "scapegrace" himself transformed, and with age held back from him
by a miracle.

And there came a day, too, when a sweet-voiced, silver-haired old lady,
with her grandchildren playing about her, told these two strangers from
Africa how her lover of long ago had gone there to win her a fortune,
and had never returned, and how she had waited ten long years for him,
till all hope of him had fled, before she married; and how even now she
held his memory in dear regard.

How astonished and delighted she had been at the blazing diamond I had
given her, in memory of that old adventurer, of whom we said we had
heard in far-off Africa; and how I feared as she looked in my eyes,
that she would know. For as she gazed tearfully at me, and stammered
her protests and thanks for she was poor, and it meant wealth to her I
saw her eyes widen as they looked into my own, and she stammered: "You!
. . . who are you? . . . You have his very eyes, are you his son?"

Almost was I tempted to tell her all, but the Consul's warning glance
stayed me; and why, indeed, should I change her sweet memory of me as I
had been, into the horror and dismay she must feel if she knew all?

And so I left her happy, and she blessed me as I went; blessed me as a
mother might do for indeed I was apparently young enough to be her son
and to her amongst all the women of my own land my disfigurements were
as nothing, for she was of thos