"'I have but this moment arrived,' I replied. "'In search of me?' "'Yes, my dear brother,' I said, passing my arm around him. 'We must speak together, in love and confidence, as we have ever done.' "Already he was softened, and I breathed a grateful sigh. "'Have you been followed, Eric?' I asked. "'I do not know,' he replied. 'I cannot say. I have been racked and tormented by torturing fancies. Trees have taken ominous shapes; shadows have haunted me; my mind is distraught; my heart is bleeding!' "It would occupy me for too long a time to narrate circumstantially all that passed between me and Eric on that our last interview. Suffice it that I succeeded to some extent in calming him, that I succeeded in making him understand that I had done him no conscious wrong; that Patricia was my wife and loved me. "'Had it been your lot, Eric,' I said, 'to have won her love, I should have suffered as you are suffering; but believe me, my dear brother, that I should have endeavoured to bear my sufferings like a man. It lay not with us that this should have occurred; it lay with Patricia. It is not so much our happiness, but hers, that is at stake.' "It is a consolation to me in my present peril to know that I succeeded in wooing him back to our old relations, in which we were guided wholly and solely by brotherly love. You are not to believe that this was accomplished without difficulty. There were, on his side, paroxysms of rebellion and despair, in one of which--after he had learned that I and Patricia were man and wife--he cried, 'Well, kill me, for I do not care to live!' These were the words heard by the witness who has testified against me. They bear, I well know, an injurious construction, but my conscience is not disturbed. My heart is--and I am racked by a torture which threatens to undermine my reason when I think of my wife and unborn child. "At length peace was established between me and my dear brother. And then it was that I told him of my dream, and of the uncontrollable impulse which had urged me to seek for him in the forest. I asked him to accompany me back to Patricia, but he said that was impossible, and that he could not endure the agony of it. I put myself in his place, and recognised that his refusal was natural. But I could not entirely dismiss my fears for his safety. Eric, however, refused to share them. 'What is to be will be,' he said; 'otherwise it would not have been fated that our father and his brother--twins, as we are--should have loved the same woman, and that we should have done the same.' "I was anxious to get back to Patricia, and I left him in the forest. I knew nothing further until I was arrested and thrown into prison." "An innocent man?" said Doctor Louis. "As innocent as yourself," was Emilius's reply. IX.