'I am sorry now,' said he as he drove along, 'that I solicited permission to inspect the remains. The photographs were perfectly convincing, and still I felt it--I feel it--my duty to make as sure as opportunity admits. Captain Oilier will expect me to tell him all that it was in my power to learn. Nor, perhaps, should I feel perfectly satisfied to erect the monument I intend for my poor child without looking into her coffin to see that it is she herself who will be under it.' I answered that this melancholy undertaking was even less needful to me than to him; but that, like himself, I saw the necessity of confirming my own opinion by every possible testimony, for the peace of my own heart as well as for the satisfaction of Miss Otway's father. We then talked of my chances of finding Marie in the hull upon the island, and I told him how I had hired the brig 'Albatross' and intended myself to sail in her as soon as she discharged her cargo and was ready for sea, which I hoped would be about the close of the following week. I saw little of the scenery we were driven by; we passed a number of gigantic aloes on the roadside; the hard-blue mountains, towering into the heavens with keenly cut skylines, with great spaces of their sides lustrous with the trembling and delicate foliage of the silver tree, wound with us as we wound, or shadowed us as we drove; they were an eternal presence, like the cloudless blue over them. Whilst Mr. Hoskins was telling me how he contrived to obtain an order for the exhumation of the remains, we arrived at the cemetery where we alighted, and my companion conducted me to the grave whose situation he was exactly acquainted with. A number of persons were beside the grave, two were sextons armed with mattocks, or spades, the others were strangers and remained so to me; but one, I believe, was a medical man, and another a government official. They raised their hats to us, and after the exchange of a few commonplace greetings, decorously attuned, the diggers went to work. The body had lain in this grave since August--four months. The heat thrilled in a sort of surging wave that closed upon the respiration with a sense of suffocation whilst we stood watching the diggers. I shuddered at the idea of looking. I had come to Cape Town conceiving that this body was Marie's, I now knew it was not hers; nevertheless, I guessed that the aspect of the dead face, at rest and out of sight under the cleaving spades, must become a memory that would be inseparably associated with Marie's image, whether I was to behold her again or not, and my spirits shrunk as I stood watching.