Here the speaker paused, and covered his rough face. My Lady, too, was deeply moved. For near a minute, neither spoke. Then the man resumed: “I slipped into the sea, and struck out aimlessly enough, but with the instinct of a swimmer. Fool that I was to wish to live!” Again he paused; but this time, to mutter an execration. “And did not all your care and unselfish love suffice to save her?” asked the listener tenderly. “No, Lady. She was drowned. I never expected otherwise in such a sea. The whole ship's company were lost, except myself. When nearly spent, I came upon a huge piece of the wreck, and held on to it till daylight, when I found myself at sea. I would to God that it had not been so! I was nearer Heaven at that time than I have ever been since, and I ought to have perished then, when all which made life precious had already gone: it would have been far better to have died with her, than to live without her. But I did live. After two days and three nights of hunger and thirst, a vessel picked me up, a sodden mass of rags, half-dead and half-mad. They nursed me and made me well--it was a cruel kindness--and after many days, I was able to tell them what had happened. 'Ay, then,' said they, 'the pilot was right who came to us off Falmouth. It was the _North Star_ that went to pieces in the storm; you are the sole survivor, man, of all on board. Nothing came on shore that night, or could have come on such a coast as that, save spars and corpses.'” There was silence for a minute's space: the strong man's chest laboured in vain to give him breath for utterance; in vain his horny hand dashed the big tears from his brown cheeks; they still rained on. “Alas, poor man!” said my Lady, in a broken and pitiful voice, “I feel for you from my very soul. And when you found your three-weeks' bride was dead--I think you said you had married her but three weeks--what then became of _you?_” “What matters?” asked the man half-angrily, “It mattered nothing even to myself. The vessel took me--it was all one to me whither she was bound--to New South Wales. And in the New World I did indeed begin a new life--but it was a far worse one than in the old, I was reckless, hopeless already, and I was not long in becoming Godless. When that is said, a man's history is the same, wherever he lives, whatever he does, and however he ends.” He stamped his foot upon the ground, as though he would keep down some rising demon, and his voice once more resumed the hoarseness it had exchanged for something almost plaintive throughout his story. “Ralph, Ralph,” began my Lady reprovingly, and touching his rough sailor's sleeve with her gloved hand---- “And how the devil should you know my name is Ralph?” interrupted the other in blank amazement. “My maid, Mary Forest, told me it was Ralph,” returned my Lady calmly.