Old! yet they completed the year 1867.
He now tore through them for the dates alone, and soon found they went to 1868. Yet they were old papers. He had sailed in May, 1867.
“My God!” he cried, in agony, “I HAVE LOST A YEAR.”
This thought crushed him. By and by he began to carry this awful idea into details. “My Rosa has worn mourning for me, and put it off again. I am dead to her, and to all the world.”
He wept long and bitterly.
Those tears cleared his brain still more. For all that, he was not yet himself; at least, I doubt it; his insanity, driven from the intellect, fastened one lingering claw into his moral nature, and hung on by it. His soul filled with bitterness and a desire to be revenged on mankind for their injustice, and this thought possessed him more than reason.
He joined the family at breakfast; and never a word all the time. But when he got up to go, he said, in a strange, dogged way, as if it went against the grain, “God bless the house that succors the afflicted.” Then he went out to brood alone.
“Dick,” said Phoebe, “there's a change. I'll never part with him: and look, there's Collie following him, that never could abide him.”
“Part with him?” said Reginald. “Of course not. He is a gentleman, and they are not so common in Africa.”
Dick, who hated Falcon, ignored this speech entirely, and said, “Well, Pheeb, you and Collie are wiser than I am. Take your own way, and don't blame me if anything happens.”