From the case which he carried in his breast pocket, Everard extracted Sir Gilbert’s missive and handed it to the other. “I will see you again in the course of a few minutes,” he said. It will be enough to say that neither one nor the other sailed by the _Arbaces_, but caused themselves and their belongings to be transferred back to shore at the last moment. A few hours later, as they sat together over their coffee and cigars in a private room of the Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, John Alexander Clare proceeded to give his companion an outline of his history from the time of the explosion of the lake steamer by which he was supposed to have been killed. Of that narrative all that need be given here is such a summary as will enable the reader to follow the sequence of events, the outcome of which was the unpremeditated meeting of himself and Lisle on board the _Arbaces_. As may perhaps be remembered, Mr. Travis, Alec’s business partner, could not reasonably have come to any other conclusion than that the latter had lost his life by the explosion of the _Prairie Belle_, seeing that week after week passed over without bringing any tidings of him; and, indeed, it was not till nearly three months had gone by that one day a tall, emaciated, almost ghastly figure stalked into the office, and for the moment all but made Mr. Travis’s hair stand on end when, in hollow tones, it said: “Well, Frank, old fellow, how are you by now?” It appeared that he had been picked up, clinging to a spar and all but insensible, nearly an hour after the explosion had taken place. His rescuer, a farmer who lived on the margin of the lake, caused Alec to be taken to his house, where he was carefully nursed and tended by the farmer’s wife and daughter. He had been terribly bruised and half blinded by the explosion, and for several weeks he wandered in his mind and knew neither where he was, nor what had befallen him. The farmer and his family belonged to the sect known as Quietists, and as they read no newspapers and held as little communion with the outside world as possible, it followed that Alec’s name was omitted from the published list of the survivors of the explosion. Small wonder was it that Travis almost looked upon his partner as on one come back from the grave. Not till then did Alec learn of the inquiries which had been made about him during his absence. That the man who made them had come specially from England, Mr. Travis did not doubt, but as he had declined to state the nature of his business, there was nothing more to tell. The fact interested Alec but faintly, and soon passed out of his thoughts. He was a banished man; his wife had deserted him; his child was dead; and to him, after his accident and the illness which resulted from it, his past life gradually assumed the faded proportions of a dream, and not a real experience of his own.