‘A chance,’ he continued, ‘that need not keep me waiting long for it to happen. D’ye think I could rest with the knowledge that that scoundrel and the woman he has rendered faithless to me are close yonder?’ he exclaimed, pointing as though there had come a vision of the Atlantic before his mind’s eye, and he saw the yacht afloat upon it. ‘Who’s to tell me that before the month is out our friend the Colonel will not be drifting somewhere fathoms deep with a shot through his heart?’ ‘If you catch him you will shoot him?’ ‘Oh yes.’ ‘And Lady Monson?’ He looked down upon his hands without answering. ‘I am a single man,’ said I, ‘and am, therefore, no doubt disqualified from passing an opinion. But I vow to heaven, Wilfrid, if my wife chose to leave me for another man, I would not lift a finger either to regain her or to avenge myself. A divorce would fully appease me. Who would not feel gay to be rid of a woman whose every heart-throb is a dishonour? What more unendurable than an association rendered an incomparable insult, and the basest lie under heaven, by one’s wife’s secret abhorrence and her desire for another?’ On a sudden he sprang to his feet as though stabbed. ‘Cease, for Christ’s sake!’ he shouted. ‘The more truthful your words are, the more they madden me. If I could tear her from me,’ clutching at his breast in a wild, tragical way--‘if I could cleanse my heart of her as you would purify a vessel of what has lain foul and poisonous in it; if disgust would but fall cool on my resentment and leave me loathing her merely; if--if--if! But it is _if_ that makes the difference betwixt hell and heaven in this bad world of unexpected things.’ He sat afresh, passing the back of his hand over his brow, and sighing heavily. ‘There is no _if_ for me,’ said he. ‘I love her passionately yet, and so hate her besides that----’ He checked himself with a shake of the head. ‘No, no, perhaps not when it _came_ to it,’ he muttered as though thinking aloud. ‘We are wasting time,’ he cried, pulling out his watch. ‘Charlie, you will accompany me?’ ‘But you say you start the day after to-morrow?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘From Southampton?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And, should you find the “Shark” gone when you arrive at the Cape----’ ‘Well?’ ‘Ay,’ said I, ‘that’s just it. We should be like Adam and Eve, with all the world before us where to choose.’ ‘Charlie, will you come? I counted upon you from the moment of forming my resolution. You have been a sailor. You are the one man of them all that I should turn to in such a time as this. Say you will come. Laura Jennings, my wife’s--my--my sister-in-law I mean--will accompany us. Did I tell you this? Yes; I recollect. She is a stout-hearted little woman, as brave as she is beautiful, and so shocked, so shocked!’ He clasped his hands upon his brow, lifting his eyes. ‘She would pass through a furnace to rescue her sister from this infamy. Come!’ ‘You give me no time.’