my arm to the mirror. I knew I
could not have been mistaken when I felt them.

There on the upper arm, above the line of sunburn that one gets from
working with sleeves rolled up, there on the white skin showed _the red
marks of four slender fingers and a thumb_! I sat down suddenly at sight
of them, and pulling open a drawer, found a flask of neat brandy, and
gulped it down, emptied it in one gulp.

Then I turned to him and pointed to the marks.

"In God's name, how came these here?" I said. "What--what happened up
there on deck?"

He looked at me very gravely.

"I saved you," he said, "or rather I didn't, for I could not. But _she_
did."

"What do you mean?" I stammered.

"Let me get these clothes off," he said, "and some dry ones on; and I'll
tell you."

Words fail to describe my feelings as I watched the clothes come off him
and dry ones go on just as if hands were arranging them.

I sat and shuddered. I tried to close my eyes, but the weird, unnatural
sight drew them as a lodestone.

"I'm sorry that you should have had this shock," he said. "I know what
it must have been like, though it was not so bad for me when they seemed
to come, for they came gradually as time went on."

"What came gradually?" I asked.

"Why, these arms! They're what I'm telling you about. You asked me to
tell you, I thought?"

"Did I?" I said. "I don't know what I'm saying or asking. I think I'm
going mad, quite mad."

"No," he said, "you're as sane as I am, only when you come across
something strange, unique for that matter, you are naturally terrified.
Well, it was like this. I told you about my adventures with the niggers
up country. That was quite true. They cut off both my arms--you can see
the stumps for that matter. And I told you that I came home to find my
wife dying. Her heart had always been weak, I'd known that, and it had
gradually grown more feeble. There must have been, indeed there was, a
strange sort of telepathy between us. She had had fearful attacks of
heart failure on both occasions when the niggers had mutilated me, I
learnt on comparing notes.

"But I had known too, somehow, that I must escape at all costs. It was
the knowledge that made me try again after each failure. I should have
gone on trying to escape as long as I had lived, or rather as long as
she had lived. I knelt beside her bed and she put out her arms and laid
them round my neck.

"'So you have come back to me before I go,' she said. '