He did not answer her.. His eyes were staring at the paper. He was reading something with an intensity that prevented his hearing her. She waited patiently until he looked up in a puzzled way, and remarked once more: “Great Gloriana!” “What is it, Jack? What have you been reading there?” she said. He gave a little start, as if he had not expected to see her beside him. “I beg your pardon,” he cried. “I was so--so--knocked--read it--the letter--there--farther down.” “Horace Lyman!” she cried. “What is this?” The name that had been so much in their thoughts for all these weeks was there--printed in small capitals at the foot of a letter addressed to the editor: “Horace Lyman, master mariner.” It did not take her long to read every word that appeared above that signature. The letter was headed “An Impostor,” and between that heading and the signature she read the following: “Sir,--A copy of your esteemed paper, dated the 2nd ult., having come into my hand, I learn that a man named Marcus Blaydon has been giving an account to your representatives of an incident which he describes as a miraculous escape from drowning when endeavouring to carry a line ashore from the wreck of the barque _Kingsdale_, off the coast of Nova Scotia, on the night of April the 9th. Sir, I fear that you have been hoaxed by an impostor in this matter; for it would be impossible to believe that any man who, when he reached the shore, had the heartlessness to free himself from the line, leaving his messmates to their fate--certain death, as he had every reason to believe it would be--and then to hurry away from the scene of the disaster, would have the effrontery to face men and women--and _women_, I repeat--in a Christian land. “Sir, I am prepared to prove every word that I say, and what I do say and affirm solemnly and before my Maker, is that Marcus Blaydon cast off the line which he had carried ashore, leaving us to our fate, and walked away from the coast inland without making any enquiry and without making any attempt to procure help for us in our extremity from some of the fishing population of that coast. With his further movements ashore I am also fully acquainted up to a certain point; but I still say that I refuse to believe that even so inhuman a wretch would presume to have the impudence to face Christian people in a Christian country.” That was the letter, written by the hand of a sailor-man all unaccustomed to that elegance of diction which marks the sentences of a newspaper correspondent, but at the same time quite practised in the art of striking out straight from the shoulder, regardless of pleonasms in composition. “That is Horace Lyman, and that is Marcus Blaydon,” said Priscilla without emotion.