At the end of two years, the doctor to whose care Haidee had been entrusted called Lucian into his private room one day and told him that he had grave news to communicate. His patient, he said, was dying--slowly, but very surely. But there was more than that: before her death she would recover her reason. She would probably recall everything that had taken place; it was more than possible that she would have painfully clear recollections of the scene, whatever it might be, that had immediately preceded her sudden loss of sanity. It was but right, said the doctor, that Mr. Damerel should know of this, but did Mr. Damerel wish to be with his wife when this development occurred? It might be a painful experience, and death must soon follow it. It was for Mr. Damerel to decide. Lucian decided on the instant. He had carried an image of Haidee in his mind for two years, and it had become fixed on his mental vision with such firmness that he could not think of her as anything but what he imagined her to be. He told the doctor that he would wish to know as soon as his wife regained her reason--it was his duty, he said, to be with her. After that, every visit to the private asylum was made with anxious wonder if the tortured brain had cleared. It was not until the following spring--two and a half years after the tragedy of the Bristol--that Lucian saw Haidee. He scarcely knew the woman to whom they took him. They had deluged him with warnings as to the change in her, but he had not expected to find her a grey-haired, time-worn woman, and he had difficulty in preserving his composure when he saw her. He did not know it, but her reason had returned some time before, and she had become fully cognisant of her surroundings and of what was going to happen. More than that, she had asked for a priest and had enjoyed ghostly consolation. She gazed at Lucian with a curious wistfulness, and yet there was something strangely sullen in her manner. ‘I wanted to see you,’ she said, after a time. ‘I know I’m going to die very soon, and there are things I want to say. I remember all that happened, you know. Oh yes, it’s quite clear to me now, but somehow it doesn’t trouble me--I was mad enough when I did it.’ ‘Don’t speak of that,’ he said. ‘Forget it all.’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind,’ she went on. ‘What I wanted to say was, that I’m sorry that--well, you know.’ Lucian gazed at her with a sickening fear creeping closely round his heart. He had forced the truth away from him: he was to hear it at last from the lips of a dying woman. ‘You were to blame, though,’ she said presently. ‘You ought not to have let me go alone on his yacht or to the Highlands. It was so easy to go wrong there.’ Lucian could not control a sharp cry. ‘Don’t!’ he said, ‘don’t! You don’t know what you’re saying. It can’t be that--that you wrote the truth in that letter? It was--hallucination.’ She looked at him out of dull eyes.