Nor was he mad when he pressed him to his heart in that embrace all a-quiver with the grief-stricken fervor of his paternal love. He was not mad in those visions of the past, in that "spoken dream," as the doctor had said, which fitted into their whole life with terrifying exactitude. All these ideas had rushed at once into the young man's over-excited mind during those very brief moments, as clear and distinct as memories of the past in the mind of a drowning man. He had lost everything, everything, except the sweet, pure woman yonder, who loved him, understood him, pitied him, and did not tell him so--in order to spare him! The unreasoned impulse, by virtue of which, in the throes of that rayless distress, he had asked his only friend to unite their destinies, was also, to follow out a too exact comparison, like the instinctive movement with which the drowning man, whirled away by the current, seizes in a desperate clutch the helping hand extended over the gunwale. How happy Landri would have been to pass that long afternoon with her, at her feet, his head on her knees; to feel descend upon him the only charity that despairing souls welcome--sympathy without words! He had been mortally afraid that he should himself speak if he stayed; and so he had gone away to wrestle anew with the painful going and coming of his thoughts, which tossed him to and fro once more in their resistless surge. One by one the dying man's words repeated themselves in his mind, from the sadly affectionate "You have come" of his first greeting, to the outcries at the end, the imperative "You say that he's my son!"--a supreme confession of the death-agony, followed by a supreme protest which corroborated its truth. It proved the intense determination with which the man had guarded his secret so long as his strength permitted him to do so.