, pouring down through the burst hatchway, tore the door of
the cuddy from its hinges. Sylvia found herself surrounded by a
wildly-surging torrent which threatened to overwhelm her. She shrieked
aloud for aid, but her voice was inaudible even to herself. Clinging to
the mast which penetrated the little cuddy, she fixed her eyes upon the
door behind which she imagined North was, and whispered a last prayer
for succour. The door opened, and from out the cabin came a figure clad
in black. She looked up, and the light of the expiring lamp showed her a
face that was not that of the man she hoped to see. Then a pair of dark
eyes beaming ineffable love and pity were bent upon her, and a pair of
dripping arms held her above the brine as she had once been held in the
misty mysterious days that were gone.

In the terror of that moment the cloud which had so long oppressed her
brain passed from it. The action of the strange man before her completed
and explained the action of the convict chained to the Port
Arthur coal-wagons, of the convict kneeling in the Norfolk Island
torture-chamber. She remembered the terrible experience of Macquarie
Harbour. She recalled the evening of the boat-building, when, swung
into the air by stalwart arms, she had promised the rescuing prisoner to
plead for him with her kindred. Regaining her memory thus, all the agony
and shame of the man's long life of misery became at once apparent to
her. She understood how her husband had deceived her, and with what base
injustice and falsehood he had bought her young love. No question as to
how this doubly-condemned prisoner had escaped from the hideous isle of
punishment she had quitted occurred to her. She asked not--even in her
thoughts--how it had been given to him to supplant the chaplain in his
place on board the vessel. She only considered, in her sudden awakening,
the story of his wrongs, remembered only his marvellous fortitude and
love, knew only, in this last instant of her pure, ill-fated life, that
as he had saved her once from starvation and death, so had he come again
to save her from sin and from despair. Whoever has known a deadly peril
will remember how swiftly thought then travelled back through scenes
clean forgotten, and will understand how Sylvia's retrospective vision
merged the past into the actual before her, how the shock of recovered
memory subsided in the grateful utterance of other days--"Good Mr.
Dawes!"

The eyes of the man and w