“Your will was found, leaving all you possessed to me, and with it a letter addressed: ‘To my wife: for her eye alone.’
“I had been so haunted by the remembrance of that right hand, pointing skyward from the sea, and now I was to receive a message, penned by those precious fingers, which should indeed point out a ray of hope in the black sky of my sunless future.
“Nigel, do you remember?”
The man in the chair slipped his brown hands into the pockets of his coat. He did not lift his eyes from the floor.
“I remember nothing,” he said, very low.
“Then I must shew you your letter, which no eye save my own has ever seen.”
She unlocked the despatch-box, took from it a small jewel-case, opened this with a gold key hanging from a chain around her wrist; then, from a sealed envelope, drew some half-dozen sheets of closely written manuscript. Leaning forward, she held them toward him.
Slowly, with evident reluctance, the lean brown hand came out of the coat pocket.
He took them from her, and let his eyes rest on the first page.
There followed moments of tense silence.