d heard the sound of a falling
body.

"What do you here?" he exclaimed, after a minute of silence; "how dared
you return to your native shore thinking as you did."

"I thought you dead," I gasped, "dead by my hand, and I could not rest.
I wandered from place to place, but I found no peace, until I
determined to confess what I thought I had done."

"And you came home for that?"

"For that."

"Fool, fool that I was not to think of the idiot's conscientiousness,"
he muttered, "then all might have been arranged even yet; but now he
knows all, and I am undone."

"But how did you manage to escape?" I asked, still in a dazed kind of
way.

"I will tell you," he replied, with a bitter, mocking laugh, "for
nothing can be altered now. You thought you knew more than anyone
about our coast, but I had found a place of which you knew nothing.
There is a crevice and a broad ledge beneath that place where we
wrestled, and finding that you were stronger than I, I determined to do
by cunning what I could not do by brute force. So dragging you to this
place I slipped from you, fell down upon this ledge, and allowed you to
think you had murdered me!"

He spoke with all the bitterness and cruelty of which any one could be
capable, and as I thought of what I had suffered, of the hell in which
I had lived through long months, I realised something of the old
feeling which I had entertained for him on that awful night.

"And after all, I have served you out," he went on. "I have enjoyed
Trewinion's wealth for eleven years, and I have made the most of it.
You may claim possession if you will; but precious little you will
have. I have mortgaged it up to every farthing it is worth, and if you
hadn't come soon you would have found another family here. Even now
you will have a difficulty in keeping the house above your head," and
he laughed mockingly.

As he said this, it struck me that he was trying to make me angry, and
as I saw the wickedness and meanness of his heart, I felt a great
bitterness rising within me. Then I remembered what I felt at
Smyrna--how I had prayed that God would help me to love, and in a
second the bitterness was gone, and all harsh feelings were turned to
pity. I saw the veil torn aside, and I knew that, much as I had
suffered, he had suffered more; that deep as I had been in hell, he had
been in a hell yet deeper. I did not remember the deceit, the fraud,
the treachery he had practised towards me, I on