s one of the curious facts of human
experience that sometimes those who injure us hate us because they have
done so."

"May I venture to ask for a fuller account of the injury he did you?"
said Nigel with some hesitancy.

For some moments the hermit did not answer. He was evidently struggling
with some suppressed feeling. Turning a look full upon his young
friend, he at length spoke in a low sad voice--"I have never mentioned
my grief to mortal man since that day when it pleased God to draw a
cloud of thickest darkness over my life. But, Nigel, there is that in
you which encourages confidence. I confess that more than once I have
been tempted to tell you of my grief--for human hearts crave intelligent
sympathy. My faithful servant and friend Moses is, no doubt, intensely
sympathetic, but--but--well, I cannot understand, still less can I
explain, why I shrink from making a confidant of him. Certainly it is
not because of his colour, for I hold that the _souls_ of men are
colourless!"

"I need not trouble you with the story of my early life," continued the
hermit. "I lost my dear wife a year after our marriage, and was left
with a little girl whose lovely face became more and more like that of
her mother every day she lived. My soul was wrapped up in the child.
After three years I went with her as a passenger to Batavia. On the way
we were attacked by a couple of pirate junks. Baderoon was the pirate
captain. He killed many of our men, took some of us prisoners, sank the
vessel, seized my child, and was about to separate us, putting my child
into one junk while I was retained, bound, in the other."

He paused, and gazed over the glowing tree-tops into the golden horizon,
with a longing, wistful look. At the same time something like an
electric shock passed through Nigel's frame, for was not this narrative
strangely similar in its main features to that which his own father had
told him on the Keeling Islands about beautiful little Kathleen Holbein
and her father? He was on the point of seizing the hermit by the hand
and telling him what he knew, when the thought occurred that attacks by
pirates were common enough in those seas, that other fathers might have
lost daughters in this way, and that, perhaps, his suspicion might be
wrong. It would be a terrible thing, he thought, to raise hope in his
poor friend's breast unless he were pretty sure of the hope being well
founded. He would wait and hear more. H