ourselves the vessel we sailed in."

"Where have you left your companions?"

"By this hour," answered Margrave, "they are in reach of my summons; and
when you and I have achieved the discovery--in the results of which we
shall share--I will exact no more from your aid. I trust all that rests
for my cure to my nurse and her swarthy attendants. You will aid me now,
as a matter of course; the physician whose counsel you needed to guide
your own skill enjoins you to obey my whim--if whim you still call it; you
will obey it, for on that whim rests your own sole hope of
happiness,--you, who can love--I love nothing but life. Has my frank
narrative solved all the doubts that stood between you and me, in the
great meeting-grounds of an interest in common?"

"Solved all the doubts! Your wild story but makes some the darker,
leaving others untouched: the occult powers of which you boast, and some
of which I have witnessed,--your very insight into my own household
sorrows, into the interests I have, with yourself, in the truth of a faith
so repugnant to reason--"

"Pardon me," interrupted Margrave, with that slight curve of the lip which
is half smile and half sneer, "if, in my account of myself, I omitted what
I cannot explain, and you cannot conceive: let me first ask how many of
the commonest actions of the commonest men are purely involuntary and
wholly inexplicable. When, for instance, you open your lips and utter a
sentence, you have not the faintest idea beforehand what word will follow
another. When you move a muscle can you tell me the thought that prompts
to the movement? And, wholly unable thus to account for your own simple
sympathies between impulse and act, do you believe that there exists a man