I rose from the chair on which I had been sitting during the latter part of my conversation with my mother, and made one step forward.
"Wilfred!"
"Roger!"
"You here!" I exclaimed bewildered.
"Ah, my presence surprises you, does it?" he said, and every tone of his voice told of vindictiveness—hatred.
For a moment I could not think; my head whirled and I staggered to my seat as though I were a drunken man. Wilfred was not dead, the guilt of his murder did not rest upon me, I was free—free! I had not hurled him to his death on that awful night; my gloomy forebodings had no real foundation.
How had he managed to escape? I had stood with him alone on that dizzy height, and as far as I remembered the cliff was perpendicular there; he had I felt slipped from me, and I had heard the sound of a falling body.
"What do you here?" he exclaimed, after a minute of silence; "how dared you return to your native shore thinking as you did."
"I thought you dead," I gasped, "dead by my hand, and I could not rest. I wandered from place to place, but I found no peace, until I determined to confess what I thought I had done."
"And you came home for that?"