I was too exhausted to follow. I sat down where I was, and burying my face in my hands yielded to a weak self-pity. My whole life lay in pieces at my feet. I had killed those that had loved me best, driven on by a fate that had blinded and mastered me. Through no sin of my own I felt the clinging guiltiness of blood upon my hands. Ahead of me I saw no cleansing, no healing. For now blackened out of my life was the one bright gleam that had cheered me forward: my love for Jenny. There would be no Jenny for me any more. A terrible river of blood lay between us. The bridge of reconciliation that might have spanned it I had destroyed with my own hands. If I had stifled my suspicions and gone to the Captain when he had called me, all might have been well. But I had closed the one door that he had opened. I had refused the hand he had offered. I had sealed my own fate. Jenny's Tommy, he had named me. The name stirred bitterly at my heart. I remembered how Jenny had sent me forth to find her father's foe. I remembered, too, how I had believed I had found him and killed him, but had only killed my own friend. The irony of the thing had stung me at the time. But now it seemed that the whole conclave of the fates were heaving in laughter; for I had succeeded only in tracking down myself. I had been hunting myself about the world. I was the man I had promised to kill. I thought I couldn't do better than fulfil my promise. Jenny's Tommy! There would be no Jenny for me. How Dirk found me I needn't relate; nor how he took me back to London, comforting me in his rough way when by broken fragments I gave him all my story. He saw nothing to mope over. "Girls," he said, "don't let a spot o' blood upset them." But I couldn't bring myself to face Jenny. Not merely was I afraid of meeting the Captain again, but the thought of naming love to Jenny sickened and disgusted me. I was awakened into some kind of alertness when, after we had been in London some days, Dirk told me the Captain hadn't returned to his home. He knew the house, for he had tracked Abou there before he had set out for the _Dolphin_ on his last journey. Jenny had been left in the care of the maid, while the Captain, too restless to wait for Abou to find me, had followed him after some days of fretful anxiety. Jenny, Dirk had learnt, was still awaiting her father, unconscious of the tragedy that had befallen him.