t made this
long voyage--from Egypt to Australia--alone,--you, to whom wealth gave
no excuse for privation?"

"The woman came with me; and some chosen attendants. I engaged to
ourselves the vessel we sailed in."

"Where have you left your companions?"

"By this hour," answered Margrave, "they are in reach of my summons; and
when you and I have achieved the discovery--in the results of which we
shall share--I will exact no more from your aid. I trust all that rests
for my cure to my nurse and her swarthy attendants. You will aid me now,
as a matter of course; the physician whose counsel you needed to guide
your own skill enjoins you to obey my whim--if whim you still call
it; you will obey it, for on that whim rests your own sole hope of
happiness,--you, who can love--I love nothing but life. Has my frank
narrative solved all the doubts that stood between you and me, in the
great meeting-grounds of an interest in common?"

"Solved all the doubts! Your wild story but makes some the darker,
leaving others untouched: the occult powers of which you boast, and
some of which I have witnessed,--your very insight into my own household
sorrows, into the interests I have, with yourself, in the truth of a
faith so repugnant to reason--"

"Pardon me," interrupted Margrave, with that slight curve of the lip
which is half smile and half sneer, "if, in my account of myself, I
omitted what I cannot explain, and you cannot conceive: let me first
ask how many of the commonest actions of the commonest men are purely
involuntary and wholly inexplicable. When, for instance, you open your
lips and utter a sentence, you have not the faintest idea beforehand
what word will follow another. When you move a muscle can you tell me
the thought that prompts to the movement? And, wholly unable thus to
account for your own simple sympathies between impulse and act, do you
believe that there exists a man upon earth who can read all the riddles
in the heart and brain of another? Is it not true that not one drop of
water, one atom of matter, ever really touches another? Between each and
each there is always a space, however infinitesimally small. How, then,
could the world go on, if every man asked another to make his whole
history and being as lucid as daylight before he would buy and sell
with him? All interchange and alliance rest but on this,--an interest in
common. You and I have established that interest: all else, all you ask
more, is superfl