You see the situation? Do you see how the poison of evil had worked in me all these years, how it had dominated me for a time, how it had lain dormant, how it had cropped out hideously like some unspeakable and inexterminable disease? Silently through the years it had corrupted me, corrupting my mind even more than my body, more insidiously and more surely, and with more deadly a result. And at last from a small boat on San Francisco Bay--we had gone into the city to live--John Smiley’s wife was drowned. I was left with the child on my hands and with no embodiment for my fancied vengeance. I think I went nearly insane then, if I was not insane already. I determined to make what atonement I could. I took certain cowardly precautions and prepared to send the child back to her father. There is something supernatural in the manner in which that return was accomplished. I did not learn of it for some years. I took the boy, Guy, and went to Paris, taking a servant with me in the semblance of my wife and his mother. She became an invalid abroad, but I have not cast her off. In Paris I came to see that my atonement must be as complete as I could make it. So I came back to New York and made inquiries through Richard Hand. I was then “Captain Vanton,” or “Buel Vanton” but I wrote him as Jacob King. He replied; from what he told me--and I paid him, of course--I was able to piece together the truth that was hidden from him and from others. The next step was the appearance of Captain Vanton in Blue Port. The rest, externally, is known; what can never be known is the suffering I have endured. It is all deserved and much more, no doubt, but endurance is nearing an end. I am probably insane in some peculiar fashion. I see nothing but jewels; jewels arranged as if in the hair and on the bosom of an invisible woman. Then I see Keturah Hawkins, a very young Keturah Hawkins, but Keturah Hawkins beyond question, pass along the street--and she wears no jewels. I think her aunt has them, and some day in my madness I shall break in and steal them, just to handle them, these stones that touched her white skin and were nested in that wine-dark hair. Pray God, I may never lay hold of them or I shall go raving mad! The girl, this reincarnation of the woman I once held in my arms, I have no further concern with. If ever she comes to me to know her story I shall tell her. But she is Keturah. She knows. The boy, young Guy, I have kept close by me, and I have told him some of this shameful story in order that, if he does indeed have any of my blood in his veins, he may have, in knowledge of the truth, some antidote to its poison. The girl will have money, and I will provide for the boy.