a took his mind again to
Rosey in her loneliness; for when he was found by a search-party at
the foot of a telegraph-post he had used his last match to burn down,
he was inarticulate, and seemed to give his name as Harrisson. As he
slowly recovered sense and speech at the telegraph-station--for the
interruption of the current had been his cry for help to its
occupants--he heard himself addressed by the name and saw the mistake;
but he did not correct it, being, indeed, not sorry for an incognito,
sick of his life, as it were, and glad to change his identity. But how
if Rosey wrote to him then--think of it!--under his old name? Fancy
_her_ when the time came for a possible reply, with who could say what
of hope in it! Fancy her many decisions that it was still too soon for
an answer, followed by as many others as time went on that it was not
too late! If he had received such a letter from her then, might it
not all have been different? May she not have written one? He had
talked so little with her; nothing forbade the idea. And so his mind
travelled round with monotonous return, always to that old time, and
those old scenes, and all the pain of them.

It was curious--he noted the oddity himself--that his whole life in
America took the drama character, and _he_ became the spectator. He
never caught himself playing his own part over again, with all its
phases of passion or excitement, as in the earlier story. In that,
his identification of himself with his past grew and grew, and as his
fever increased through the small hours of the morning, got more and
more the force of a waking dream. And when the dawn came at last, and
the gleam from the languid sun followed it, the man who got up and
looked out towards its great blue bank of cloud was only half sure he
was not another former self, looking out towards another sea, twenty
years ago, to see if he could identify the ship that was to take him
from Kurachi to Port Jackson.

What did it all mean? Yes, sure enough he had taken his passage, and
to-morrow leagues of sea would lie between him and Rosey. That would
end it for ever. No reconciliations, no repentance then!... Was
there not still time? a chance if he chose to catch at it? Puny
irresolution! Shake it all off, and have done with it.... He shuddered
as he thought through his old part again, and then came back with
a jerk to the strange knowledge that he was opening a closed book,
a tragedy written twenty years ago; a