"Not two months."
"You are a man."
I felt more pride from this short speech than I had ever felt shame during the longest diatribe of Professor Lederer, or any of my other teachers. There were few things which I would not have been willing at that moment to attempt had the stranger required it; but he offered no compact with the powers of darkness, nor anything of the sort, but only advised me to lie down in the boat and be covered with a piece of canvas, as the trip was likely to last longer than had been expected, the wind having hauled round another quarter; I could be of no more service now, and "Sleep is a warm cloak, as Sancho Panza says," he added.
I protested, affirming that I could keep awake for three days and three nights together; but I yielded to his insistence, and had hardly stretched myself on the bottom of the boat, when sleep, which I had thought so far, fell upon me heavy as lead.
How long I slept I do not exactly know; but I was awakened by the grating of the keel upon the sand of the shore. The stranger helped me up, but I was still so heavy with sleep that I cannot remember how I got ashore. The night was still dark; I could distinguish nothing but the gleaming crests of the waves breaking on a long level beach, from which the land rose higher as it ran inward. When I had recovered my full consciousness the boat had already pushed off; my unknown friend and I were following a path that ascended among trees. He held me by the hand, and in a friendly, pleasant manner pointed out the various irregularities of the path, in which he seemed to know every stone and every projecting root. At last we reached the top of the cliff; before us lay the open country, and in the distance a dark pile, which I gradually made out, in the dawning light, to be a mass of buildings, with a park or wood of immense trees.
"Here we are," said the stranger at last, as, after passing through a silent court-yard, we stood before a great dark building.
"Where?" I asked.
"At my house," he responded, laughing. We were now standing in the hall, and he was trying to light a match.
"And where is that?" I asked again. I could not myself have told how I found the boldness to put this question.
The match kindled; he lighted a lamp which was in readiness, and the light fell upon his long dishevelled beard and haggard face, in which the rain and surf seemed to have deepened every wrinkle to a fold and every fold to a furrow. He looked at me fixedly with his large deep-set eyes.