e
me more homesick when he'd gone. And for weeks I used to walk up and
down that beach there alone late in the night, until I got to thinking
that the waves were talking to me, and I got queer in my head. I had
to fight it just as I used to have to fight against whiskey, and to
talk fast so that I wouldn't think. And I tried to kill myself
hunting, and only got a broken collar-bone for my pains. Well, all
this time Alice was living in Paris and New York. I heard that some
English captain was going to marry her, and then I read in the Paris
_Herald_ that she was settled in the American colony there, and
one day it gave a list of the people who'd been to a reception she
gave. She could go where she pleased, and she had money in her own
right, you know; and she was being revenged on me every day. And I was
here knowing it, and loving her worse than I ever loved anything on
earth, and having lost the right to tell her so, and not able to go to
her. Then one day some chap turned up from here and told her about me,
and about how miserable I was, and how well I was being punished. He
thought it would please her, I suppose. I don't know who he was, but I
guess he was in love with her himself. And then the papers had it that
I was down with the fever here, and she read about it. I _was_
ill for a time, and I hoped it was going to carry me off decently, but
I got up in a week or two, and one day I crawled down here where we're
standing now to watch the boat come in. I was pretty weak from my
illness, and I was bluer than I had ever been, and I didn't see
anything but blackness and bitterness for me anywhere. I turned around
when the passengers reached the pier, and I saw a woman coming up
those stairs. Her figure and her shoulders were so like Alice's that
my heart went right up into my throat, and I couldn't breathe for it.
I just stood still staring, and when she reached the top of the steps
she looked up, breathing with the climb, and laughing; and she says,
'Lloyd, I've come to see you.' And I--I was that lonely and weak that
I grabbed her hand, and leaned back against the railing, and cried
there before the whole of them. I don't think she expected it exactly,
because she didn't know what to do, and just patted me on the
shoulder, and said, 'I thought I'd run down to cheer you up a bit; and
I've brought Mrs. Scott with me to chaperon us.' And I said, without
stopping to think: 'You wouldn't have needed any chaperon, Alice, if