a very slender wardrobe; time was pressing; the madman to whom the clergyman who married them had shackled her would be off in wild pursuit, helter-skelter, flying moonwards mayhap in his delirium on the instant of discovering that she was gone. Time therefore pressed, and when once the anchor of the ‘Shark’ was lifted off the ground he had no intention of letting it fall again until they had measured six thousand miles of salt water. I delivered a prolonged whistle on reading this. Six thousand miles of ocean, methought, sounded intolerably real as a condition of an elopement. My cousin never removed his eyes from my face while I read. I gave him the letter, which he folded and returned to his pocket. He was now looking somewhat collected, though the surging of the passion and grief in him would show in a momentary sparkle of the eye, in a spasmodic grin and twist of the lips, in a quick clenching of his hands as though he would drive his finger-nails into his palms. I hardly knew what to say, for the letter was as full a revelation of the vile story as he could have given me in an hour’s delivery, and the injury and misery of the thing were too recent to admit of soothing words. Yet I guessed that it would do him good to talk. ‘Have they sailed yet, do you know?’ I inquired. ‘Yes,’ he answered, letting out his breath in a sigh as though some thought in him had arrested his respiration for a bit. ‘How do you know?’ ‘I arrived an hour ago from Southampton,’ he replied, ‘and have got all the information I require.’ ‘There cannot be much to add to what the letter contains,’ said I, ‘It is the completest imaginable story of the devilish business.’ He looked at me oddly, and then said, ‘Ay, it tells what has happened. But that did not satisfy me. I have gone beyond that, and know the place they are making for.’ ‘It will be six thousand miles distant, anyhow,’ said I. ‘Quite. The villain reasoned with a pair of compasses in his hand. It is Cape Town--the other side of the world; when ’tis ice and northern blasts with us, it is the fragrance of the moon-lily and a warm heaven of quiet stars with them.’ He struck the table, smothering some wild curse or other behind his set teeth, next leaped from his chair and fell to pacing the room, now and again muttering to himself with an occasional flourish of his arm. I watched him in silence. Presently he returned to the table and mixed another glass of liquor. He sat lost in thought for a little, then, with a slow lifting of his eyes, till his gaze lay steadfast on me, he said: ‘Charlie, I am going to follow them to Cape Town.’ ‘In some South African trader?’ ‘In my yacht. You know her?’ ‘I have never seen her, but I have heard of her as a very fine vessel.’