at I
deemed it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.

He woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when the sun was already
high in a windless hot sky, and he at once got up and set about the
preparation of the fire for breakfast. I followed him anxiously at
bathing, but he did not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping his head
and making some remark about the extra coldness of the water.

"River's falling at last," he said, "and I'm glad of it."

"The humming has stopped too," I said.

He looked up at me quietly with his normal expression. Evidently he
remembered everything except his own attempt at suicide.

"Everything has stopped," he said, "because----"

He hesitated. But I knew some reference to that remark he had made just
before he fainted was in his mind, and I was determined to know it.

"Because 'They've found another victim'?" I said, forcing a little
laugh.

"Exactly," he answered, "exactly! I feel as positive of it as though--as
though--I feel quite safe again, I mean," he finished.

He began to look curiously about him. The sunlight lay in hot patches
on the sand. There was no wind. The willows were motionless. He slowly
rose to feet.

"Come," he said; "I think if we look, we shall find it."

He started off on a run, and I followed him. He kept to the banks,
poking with a stick among the sandy bays and caves and little
back-waters, myself always close on his heels.

"Ah!" he exclaimed presently, "ah!"

The tone of his voice somehow brought back to me a vivid sense of the
horror of the last twenty-four hours, and I hurried up to join him. He
was pointing with his stick at a large black object that lay half in the
water and half on the sand. It appeared to be caught by some twisted
willow roots so that the river could not sweep it away. A few hours
before the spot must have been under water.

"See," he said quietly, "the victim that made our escape possible!"

And when I peered across his shoulder I saw that his stick rested on the
body of a man. He turned it over. It was the corpse of a peasant, and
the face was hidden in the sand. Clearly the man had been drowned but a
few hours before, and his body must have been swept down upon our island
somewhere about the hour of the dawn--_at the very time the fit had
passed_.

"We must give it a decent burial, you know."

"I suppose so," I replied. I shuddered a little in spite of myself, for
there was something about the appear