o man, and in the end I had
my way pretty easily. Within four years of his coming John Emmet knew
more of Menawhidden than any man in the parish; possibly more than all
the parish put together. And to-day the parish is proud of him and his
record.

"But they do not know--and you are to be one of the four persons in the
world who know--that _John Emmet was no other than John Murchison, the
captain who lost the 'Nerbuddha'!_ He had come ashore in the darkness
some five minutes before I had surprised him on the beach: had come
ashore clinging to the keg which I saw floating just beyond the
breakers. Then and there, stunned and confounded by the consequences of
his carelessness, he had played the coward for the first and last time
in his life. He had run away--and Heaven knows if in his shoes I should
not have done the same. For two nights and a day a hideous fascination
tied him to the spot. It was his face Dick had seen at the window.
The man had been hiding all day in the trench by the north wall of the
churchyard; as Dick ran out with a lantern he slipped behind a
gravestone, and when Dick gave up the search, he broke cover and fled
inland. He changed his name: let this be his excuse, he had neither
wife nor child. The man knew something of gardening: he had a couple of
pounds and some odd shillings in his pocket--enough to take him to one
of the big midland towns--Wolverhampton, I think--where he found work as
a jobbing gardener. But something of the fascination which had held him
lurking about Lansulyan, drove him to Cressingham, which--he learned
from the newspaper accounts of the wreck--was Colonel Stanhope's country
seat. Or perhaps he had some vague idea that Heaven would grant him a
chance to make amends. You understand now how the little Felicia became
his idol.

"At Lansulyan he had but two desires. The first was to live until he
had saved as many lives as his carelessness had lost in the _Nerbuddha_.
For it was nothing worse, but mere forgetfulness to change the course:
one of those dreadful lapses of memory which baffle all Board of Trade
inquiry. You may light, and buoy, and beacon every danger along the
coast, and still you leave that small kink in the skipper's brain which
will cast away a ship for all your care. The second of his desires you
have helped me to fulfil. He wished in death to be John Murchison
again, and lie where his ship lies: lie with his grand error atoned for.
John Emme