"It has gone," he said. "You have driven it away."
Uniacke hurried forward to the Rectory. That night he implored the painter for the last time to leave the island.
"Can't you feel," he said, almost passionately, "the danger you are running here, the terrible danger to yourself? The sea preys upon your mind. You ought not to be near it. Every murmur of the waves is suggestive to your ears. The voices of those bells recall to your mind the drowning of men. The sigh of that poor maniac depresses you perpetually. Leave the sea. Try to forget it. I tell you, Sir Graham, that your mind is becoming actually diseased from incessant brooding. It begins even to trick your eyes in this abominable way."
"You swear you saw nothing?"
"I do. There was nothing. You have thought of that boy until you actually see him before you."
"As he is?"
"As he is not, as he will never be."
The painter got up from his chair, came over to Uniacke, and looked piercingly into his eyes.
"Then you declare—on your honour as a priest," he said slowly, "that you do not know that my wonder-child is the boy who is buried beneath that stone?"
"I buried that boy, and I declare on my honour as a priest that I do not know it," Uniacke answered, desperately but unflinchingly.