o palliate, but rather
heightened by leaving everything so mysterious and uncertain. She was
evidently terrified--I could hear it in her voice--but implored me to
keep away, for her sake, if not for mine. At the end of the week he
appeared without warning in the office of the paper where I worked, and,
greeting me without making any allusion to what had happened, invited me
to come for two days' sailing in a small boat which had been lent him by
a friend.

"I was startled enough by this incongruous suggestion, but naturally
I accepted: you couldn't refuse such an invitation from a man who, you
suspected, intended to have such a matter out with you on the open sea.
We started immediately, and all the way down in the train for Cornwall
he talked in his usual manner, undeterred by the fact that I never
answered him. We got out at Penzance, the time then being, I suppose,
about six o'clock in the evening. I had never been to Penzance before,
but he seemed to know his way about, walking me briskly down to the
harbour, where a fishing-smack under the charge of a rough-looking
sailor was waiting for him. By now I was quite certain that he meant to
have it out with me, and for my part, after the long uncertainty of the
week, I asked nothing better than to get to grips with him. All I prayed
for was a hand-to-hand struggle in which I might have the luck to tip
him overboard, so I was rather dismayed when I saw that the sailor was
to accompany us.

"We started without any delay, getting clear of the port just as the
darkness fell and the first stars came out in a pale green sky. I had
never been with him anywhere but in London, and it crossed my mind that
it was odd to be with him so far away, off this rocky coast, in the
solitude of waters; and I looked at the green sky above the red-brown
sails of the fishing-smack, and thought of the barges floating down the
river at Chelsea. They were ships, and this was a ship; they carried
men, and this one also carried men. I looked at my companion, who sat in
the stern holding the tiller. There was a breeze, which drove us along
at quite a smart pace. 'Cornwall,' I said to myself, staring
slowly round the bay and at the black mass of St. Michael's Mount,'
Cornwall...'

"I don't know how many hours we sailed that night, but I know that when
the day broke we were out of sight of land. All that while we had not
spoken a word, though to all practical purposes we were alone, the
sailor hav