ra. Following up
this clew, he found in the Gazette a notice that H. M. ship Amphitrite
had been spoken off the Cape, and had reported the melancholy loss of a
promising physician and man of science, Dr. Staines.

The account said every exertion had been made to save him, but in vain.

Staines ground his teeth with rage at this. "Every exertion! the
false-hearted curs. They left me to drown, without one manly effort to
save me. Curse them, and curse all the world."

Pursuing his researches rapidly, he found a much longer account of a
raft picked up by Captain Dodd, with a white man on it and a dead body,
the white man having on him a considerable sum in money and jewels.

Then a new anxiety chilled him. There was not a word to identify him
with Dr. Staines. The idea had never occurred to the editor of the Cape
Gazette. Still less would it occur to any one in England. At this moment
his wife must be mourning for him. "Poor--poor Rosa!"

But perhaps the fatal news might not have reached her.

That hope was dashed away as soon as found. Why, these were all OLD
NEWSPAPERS. That gentlemanly man who had lent them to him had said so.

Old! yet they completed the year 1867.

He now tore through them for the dates alone, and soon found they went
to 1868. Yet they were old papers. He had sailed in May, 1867.

"My God!" he cried, in agony, "I HAVE LOST A YEAR."

This thought crushed him. By and by he began to carry this awful idea
into details. "My Rosa has worn mourning for me, and put it off again. I
am dead to her, and to all the world."

He wept long and bitterly.

Those tears cleared his brain still more. For all that, he was not yet
himself; at least, I doubt it; his insanity, driven from the intellect,
fastened one lingering claw into his moral nature, and hung on by it.
His soul filled with bitterness and a desire to be revenged on mankind
for their injustice, and this thought possessed him more than reason.

He joined the family at breakfast; and never a word all the time. But
when he got up to go, he said, in a strange, dogged way, as if it went
against the grain, "God bless the house that succors the afflicted."
Then he went out to brood alone.

"Dick," said Phoebe, "there's a change. I'll never part with him: and
look, there's Collie following him, that never could abide him."

"Part with him?" said Reginald. "Of course not. He is a gentleman, and
they are not so common in Africa."

Dick, who hated Fa