a distracting love for you seems to unnerve and torment
me. I beg you to wait until those days may come when I can show you all
the devotion I yearn now to give you, but must not, for every moment
that voice may reach me from beyond the grave, and I would be recreant
to the most sacred obligations, and deep responsibilities that seem now
to shape themselves before me, to our common humanity, if I forfeited an
instant of inattention. I beg you to remember all this and wait, wait,
until the depthless power of my love for you can be made clear."

I would have sunk upon my knees in the abasement and passion of my
desire for her, had she not suddenly drawn me to her, flung her arms
about my neck and placed her head where--well, I am no connoisseur in
love scenes--but that day Agnes Dodan, without a syllable of sound gave
her heart to me.

We passed back in silence, and when she left me the fluttering
handkerchief that had so often waved back its salutation on the winding
distant road was now in my hands, and its signals sent by me came to her
from the plateau. It was the simple pledge of our mutual love, a pledge
that even now as I prepare these last pages of a manuscript that is a
testament to the world, soothes my pain and renews the happiness of that
day, forever and forever lost.

The next message came a few days after my interview with Miss Dodan. It
was a rainy day in November--the spring time of that Southern land. The
register was heard by one of my assistants, Jack Jobson, a man who had
unremittingly taken my place when I was absent, and who seemed more than
anyone else dazed and wonder stricken over the experience we had. He
came running to me, a wild terror in his face, exclaiming, "It's going
again, sir. Hurry! It's running slow." I sprang upstairs, and before I
had reached it heard the telltale clicks. It was not altogether a
sheltered position, and as I reached the table I felt the bleak and
chilly air penetrating the crevices of the window, a raw ocean breeze
that in a few instants crept through my bones. But I was again
unconscious of everything; that marvellous ticking obliterated all
thought of earth, its affairs, accidents, dangers, loves, hopes,
despairs, all forgotten, swallowed up in the immeasurable revelation I
was about to receive.

The second message began at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon of November
25, 1893, two months exactly after the first. Its very opening sentences
I failed to get. It