rule in your
majesty alone.'

"Now this frightened the Lord Oro, for he has the weakness that he hates
to be alone.

"'If I do what you will, do you swear never to leave me, Yva?' he asked.
'Know that if you will not swear, the man dies.'

"'I swear,' I answered--for your sake, Humphrey--though I did not love
the oath.

"Then he gave me a certain medicine to mix with the Life-water, and when
you were almost gone that medicine cured you, though Bickley does not
know it, as nothing else could have done. Now I have told you the truth,
for your own ear only, Humphrey."

"Yva," I asked, "why did you do all this for me?"

"Humphrey, I do not know," she answered, "but I think because I must.
Now sleep a while."

Chapter XIX. The Proposals of Bastin and Bickley

So far as my body was concerned I grew well with great rapidity, though
it was long before I got back my strength. Thus I could not walk far or
endure any sustained exertion. With my mind it was otherwise. I can not
explain what had happened to it; indeed I do not know, but in a sense it
seemed to have become detached and to have assumed a kind of personality
of its own. At times it felt as though it were no longer an inhabitant
of the body, but rather its more or less independent partner. I was
perfectly clear-headed and of insanity I experienced no symptoms. Yet my
mind, I use that term from lack of a better, was not entirely under my
control. For one thing, at night it appeared to wander far away, though
whither it went and what it saw there I could never remember.

I record this because possibly it explains certain mysterious events, if
they were events and not dreams, which shortly I must set out. I spoke
to Bickley about the matter. He put it by lightly, saying that it was
only a result of my long and most severe illness and that I should
steady down in time, especially if we could escape from that island and
its unnatural atmosphere. Yet as he spoke he glanced at me shrewdly
with his quick eyes, and when he turned to go away I heard him mutter
something to himself about "unholy influences" and "that confounded old
Oro."

The words were spoken to himself and quite beneath his breath, and of
course not meant to reach me. But one of the curious concomitants of my
state was that all my senses, and especially my hearing, had become most
abnormally acute. A whisper far away was now to me like a loud remark
made in a room.

Bickley's reflection, fo