I

no more conscious of your presence than of a stone or a piece of rock-weed. shall blot you for ever from my sight, from my thought, from my memory—from this night forth. You will be to me as a thing dead. You understand?'

'Yes.'

'You swear to keep these conditions?' 'Yes.'

So it was sworn; and from that moment darkness and silence like death came be

tween us, though we were alone together in all the world.

CHAPTER X.

THE BEAR.

THUS it befell that we two abode together in the same dwelling, if I may call that a dwelling which, with Nature helping me, I fashioned with my rude hands so near to each other that we could hear each other breathing, yet so far from each other that we never exchanged look or word. As far as might be, I averted my soul as a man averts his face-avoiding him in the daytime, forgetting him in the silence of the night; yet all in vain; for I was conscious of him unceasingly, and his shadow darkened my most secret thoughts.

I have read somewhere, in some old

book or newspaper, of two poor sisters who, full of an unnatural hate, dwelt together like this in the same room in a great town; being too poor to take separate lodgings, they divided their wretched room by a line made with chalk across the floor; and so, with that chalk line only between them, abode in silence for a score of weary years; until one was carried out feet foremost, and the other, still cruel and unforgiving, was left alone. Of such hard stuff, I know, some hearts are made; of rock instead of flesh, and hard as the upper and nether millstone. Yet these foolish women had busy sounds of life all round to cheer them-the tramp of feet, voices, and all the motion of a great city; while we, whose hearts were no less hard, and whose condition was surely as sorry in the sight of God, had only the naked heavens, and the troubled sea, and the

punctual changes of darkness and of

light.

Stubborn and unforgiving, grudging the mercy I had shown (which was no true mercy, but feebleness and fear), I came and went. The days were now briefer than ever, and the nights very long and dreary; but though winter had surely set in, the temperature was not yet too cold to bear with patience, and even with comfort. For the soft swell of the southern ocean, which is ever warm like living breath, greatly subdues the violence of the climate of the islands in that region; so that neither man nor beast need perish, as they must needs do under like conditions a few degrees nearer to the north.

Nevertheless, the cold was sharp and keen, the life beyond measure unseasonable and hard to bear. The island was

draped in whiteness, and far away to the north stretched the vast fields of silent ice; while to southward and westward, where the seas thundered unfrozen, great chill mists, like steam from a caldron, were constantly arising. Nowhere was any sign of life; nay, not even a withered tree, a leafless bush, to mimic summer greenery with leaves and flowers of hueless ice. No sign, no similitude, of that green world which I had lost, never, perchance, to find again!

There was but one way to defy the loneliness of Nature and the sad monotony of the elements, and that was to discover some vigorous occupation to fatigue the frame while light lasted. This occupation I found in chasing and killing the poor seals of the sea; and although I was without firearms or any kind of projectile, I contrived by cunning and stratagem to