s
distortion of his face. His eye was on me, as he pointed significantly
down to the surf foaming two hundred feet beneath us.

"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