I rose from the chair on which I had been sitting during the latter part of my conversation with my mother, and made one step forward. "Wilfred!" "Roger!" "You here!" I exclaimed bewildered. "Ah, my presence surprises you, does it?" he said, and every tone of his voice told of vindictiveness--hatred. For a moment I could not think; my head whirled and I staggered to my seat as though I were a drunken man. Wilfred was not dead, the guilt of his murder did not rest upon me, I was free--free! I had not hurled him to his death on that awful night; my gloomy forebodings had no real foundation. How had he managed to escape? I had stood with him alone on that dizzy height, and as far as I remembered the cliff was perpendicular there; he had I felt slipped from me, and I had heard the sound of a falling body. "What do you here?" he exclaimed, after a minute of silence; "how dared you return to your native shore thinking as you did." "I thought you dead," I gasped, "dead by my hand, and I could not rest. I wandered from place to place, but I found no peace, until I determined to confess what I thought I had done." "And you came home for that?" "For that." "Fool, fool that I was not to think of the idiot's conscientiousness," he muttered, "then all might have been arranged even yet; but now he knows all, and I am undone." "But how did you manage to escape?" I asked, still in a dazed kind of way. "I will tell you," he replied, with a bitter, mocking laugh, "for nothing can be altered now. You thought you knew more than anyone about our coast, but I had found a place of which you knew nothing. There is a crevice and a broad ledge beneath that place where we wrestled, and finding that you were stronger than I, I determined to do by cunning what I could not do by brute force. So dragging you to this place I slipped from you, fell down upon this ledge, and allowed you to think you had murdered me!" He spoke with all the bitterness and cruelty of which any one could be capable, and as I thought of what I had suffered, of the hell in which I had lived through long months, I realised something of the old feeling which I had entertained for him on that awful night. "And after all, I have served you out," he went on. "I have enjoyed Trewinion's wealth for eleven years, and I have made the most of it. You may claim possession if you will; but precious little you will have. I have mortgaged it up to every farthing it is worth, and if you hadn't come soon you would have found another family here. Even now you will have a difficulty in keeping the house above your head," and he laughed mockingly.