“This provoked me to the despairing cry, which only my two children heard. It was no illusion.
“Then I came back to the shore, exhausted and overcome with emotion and fatigue. My two sailors received me half dead. It was a horrible night this last we spent on the island, and we believed ourselves abandoned forever, when day dawned, and there was the yacht sailing nearly alongside, under easy steam. Your boat was lowered—we were saved—and, oh, wonder of Divine goodness, my children, my beloved children, were there holding out their arms to me!”
Robert and Mary almost smothered their father with kisses and caresses as he ended his narrative.
It was now for the first time that the captain heard that he owed his deliverance to the somewhat hieroglyphical document which he had placed in a bottle and confined to the mercy of the ocean.
But what were Jacques Paganel’s thoughts during Captain Grant’s recital? The worthy geographer was turning over in his brain for the thousandth time the words of the document. He pondered his three successive interpretations, all of which had proved false. How had this island, called Maria Theresa, been indicated in the papers originally?
At last Paganel could contain himself no longer, and seizing Harry Grant’s hand, he exclaimed:
“Captain! will you tell me at last what really was in your indecipherable document?”
A general curiosity was excited by this question of the geographer, for the enigma which had been for nine months a mystery was about to be explained.
“Well, captain,” repeated Paganel, “do you remember the precise words of the document?”
“Exactly,” replied Harry Grant; “and not a day has passed without my recalling to memory words with which our last hopes were linked.”