ng in Charles's voice. "That might
have been me. I was out on the rocks that night, close to Flint House."

"'Tweren't you." Thalassa's reply was so low as to be almost inaudible. "I
don't know who it was, but I'll take my Bible oath it weren't you."

"Who was it then?" Charles asked breathlessly.

"A dead man, or his spirit. I know that now, though I laughed when
_he_ said it. I know better now."

He stopped suddenly, like one who has said too much, and looked moodily
out to sea.

"What do you mean by that?"

"Never mind what I mean. It's nothing to do with you. A man's a fool when
he gets talking. The tongue trips you up."

"Thalassa," said Charles solemnly, "if you know anything which might throw
the remotest light on this mystery it is your duty to reveal it."

"It's easy to talk. But I swore--I swore I would never tell."

"This is the moment to forget your oath."

"It's fine to talk--for you. But he'd come back to haunt me, if he knew."
He jerked his thumb in the direction of the distant churchyard where
Robert Turold lay.

Charles looked at his grim and secret face in despair. "I hope you realize
what you are doing by keeping silence," he said.

"I'm keeping a still tongue in my head, for one thing."

"For one thing--yes. For another, you're injuring Sisily--you're doing
more than injure her. You're letting her remain under suspicion of her
father's death, in hiding in London, hunted by the police. Yet she
believed in you. It was she who sent me to you, it was she who said: 'Tell
Thalassa from me to tell the truth, if he knows it.' Is she mistaken in
you, Thalassa? Do you think more of your own skin than her safety?"

CHAPTER XXVIII

It was a strange story which Charles Turold heard by that grey Cornish
sea--a story touched with the glitter of adventurous fortune in the sombre
setting of a trachytic island, where wine-dark breakers beat monotonously
on a black beach of volcanic sand strewn with driftwood, kelp, dead
shells, and the squirming forms of blindworms tossed up from the bowels of
a dead sea. It was there in the spell of solitude thirty years before that
Robert Turold's soul had yielded to temptation at the beck of his
monstrous ambition.

That, however, was the end--or what Robert Turold imagined to be the
end--of the story. The listener was first invited to contemplate a scene
in human progress when men gathered from the four corners of the earth and
underwent incredible hards