on you."

"No, it's Jack. Oh, Uniacke, see--see how he poses! He knows that I
shall paint him to-morrow. How horrible he is! Do the drowned always
look like that?"

"Come away, Sir Graham. This is a hideous hallucination. Come away."

"How he is altered. All his features are coarsened, bloated. My
wonder-child! He is tragic now, and he is disgusting. How loathsomely he
twists his fingers! Must I paint him like that--with that grinning,
ghastly mouth--little Jack? Ah! ah! He poses--he poses always. He would
have me paint him now,--here in the moonlight--here--here--standing on
this grave!"

"Sir Graham, come with me!" exclaimed Uniacke.

And this time he forcibly drew his companion with him from the grave.
The painter seemed inclined to resist for a moment. He turned his head
and looked long and eagerly behind him. Then suddenly he acquiesced.

"It has gone," he said. "You have driven it away."

Uniacke hurried forward to the Rectory. That night he implored the
painter for the last time to leave the island.

"Can't you feel," he said, almost passionately, "the danger you are
running here, the terrible danger to yourself? The sea preys upon your
mind. You ought not to be near it. Every murmur of the waves is
suggestive to your ears. The voices of those bells recall to your mind
the drowning of men. The sigh of that poor maniac depresses you
perpetually. Leave the sea. Try to forget it. I tell you, Sir Graham,
that your mind is becoming actually diseased from incessant brooding. It
begins even to trick your eyes in this abominable way."

"You swear you saw nothing?"

"I do. There was nothing. You have thought of that boy until you
actually see him before you."

"As he is?"

"As he is not, as he will never be."

The painter got up from his chair, came over to Uniacke, and looked
piercingly into his eyes.

"Then you declare--on your honour as a priest," he said slowly, "that
you do not know that my wonder-child is the boy who is buried beneath
that stone?"

"I buried that boy, and I declare on my honour as a priest that I do
not know it," Uniacke answered, desperately but unflinchingly.

It was his last throw for this man's salvation.

"I believe you," the painter said.

He returned to the fireplace, and leaned his face on his arm against the
mantelpiece.

"I believe you," he repeated presently. "I have been mistaken."

"Mistaken--how?"

"Sometimes I have thought that you have lied to me."

Uni