And was it any wonder? Think, if you can, how I must have felt! Ten long years before I had left her, thinking she loved another, and all those years I had roamed the world in misery and hopeless despair. I had come back at the summons of a voice which I had heard, or thought I had heard, sweeping across the wide seas, and when I had arrived at the place where I had hoped to see her I had heard she was dead. Then, after grief that amounted to madness, I had discovered her alive, and had found that she loved me. More than that, she was with me, we were alone, and I felt her hands in mine. Was it to be wondered at then, that darkness should, for the time, be driven away? Swiftly the time passed, sweetly her gentle voice sounded as she told me how happy, how safe, how contented she was, and, in spite of her terrible experience, how little weakness she felt; and then she asked me to relate to her my adventure since the night on which I left the Trewinion Manor. Again I remembered what I had done, again the agonies of remorse, which had been awakened by memory, began to eat into my soul. But I would tell her all. I would faithfully relate the tale of the years that had passed, I would faithfully tell her what I had done. And so I cast my mind back and told her what I have written in these pages. How I had gone away to sea, and how, for years, I had sailed in every clime, and with men of different nationalities. I recounted how I had been taken by the pirates, and how for two years I had been with them. I kept back nothing from her. I told her of many wild deeds that I had done, and of the wild life I had led. By and by I came to the night on which I had such a strange dream, or else had seen such a strange vision, and here I hesitated. It seemed so wonderful, and withal so unreal. I told it her, however, while she listened with wonder-lit eyes. "Yes, Roger," she said, "it all happened just as you saw it." "And did you cry out, Ruth. Did you say, 'Roger is here?'" "I did. I felt you were there, although I could not see you." "And then, Ruth; what did you do?" "I went out into the night. I knew your habit of going out on to the headland when you desired to be alone, and I felt I must go somewhere where you had been." "Yes, Ruth, and afterwards?" "I went out and wandered for a long time, until I felt my heart was breaking. I seemed all alone in the world, with no one to help me, and I cried out in anguish, 'Roger, come home.'" "And I heard you, Ruth. After I had seen you in my dream, or whatever it was, I went on deck, and while there I heard your cry, and I answered back. Did you not hear me?" "No, Roger, I heard nothing in answer to my cry, save a kind of wail, which, as it mingled with the splash of the waves seemed to be only a mocking echo of my words." "And yet your words called me home." "Thank God--and then?"