At last I got a quiet pressman in a corner and questioned him about Ellan.

"That's my native island, you know--anything going on there?"

The reporter said yes, there was some commotion about the failure of banks, with the whole island under a cloud, and its biggest financial man gone smash.

"Is his name O'Neill?" I asked.

"That's it."

"Anything else happened there while I've been away?"

"No ... yes ... well, now that I think of it, there was a big scare a year or so ago about a young peeress who disappeared mysteriously."

"Was ... was it Lady Raa?"

"Yes," said the reporter, and then (controlling myself as well as I could) I listened to a rapid version of what had become known about my dear one down to the moment when she "vanished as utterly as if she had been dropped into the middle of the Irish Sea."

It is of no use saying what I felt after that, except that flying in an express train to London, I was as impatient of space and time as if I had been in a ship down south stuck fast in the rigid besetment of the ice.

I could not talk, and I dared not think, so I shouted for a sing-song, and my shipmates (who had been a little low at seeing me so silent) jumped at the proposal like schoolboys let loose from school.

Of course O'Sullivan gave us "The Minsthrel Boy"; and Treacle sang "Yew are the enny"; and then I, yes I (Oh, God!), sang "Sally's the gel," and every man of my company joined in the ridiculous chorus.

Towards ten o'clock we changed lines on the loop at Waterloo and ran into Charing Cross, where we found another and still bigger crowd of hearty people behind a barrier, with a group of my committee, my fellow explorers, and geographers in general, waiting on the platform.

I could not help it if I made a poor return to their warm-hearted congratulations, for my eyes were once more searching for a face I could not see, so that I was glad and relieved when I heard the superintendent say that the motor-car that was to take me to the hotel was ready and waiting.

But just then O'Sullivan came up and whispered that a priest and a nun were asking to speak to me, and he believed they had news of Mary.

The priest proved to be dear old Father Dan, and the nun to be Sister Veronica, whom my dear one calls Mildred. At the first sight of their sad-joyful faces something gripped me by the throat, for I knew what they had come to say before they said it--that my darling was lost, and Father Dan (after some priestly qualms) had concluded that I was the first man who ought to be told of it.

Although this was exactly what I had expected, it fell on me like a thunderbolt, and in spite of the warmth of my welcome home, I believe in my soul I was the most downhearted man alive.

Nevertheless I bundled Father Dan and the Sister and O'Sullivan into the automobile, and jumping in after them, told the chauffeur to drive like the deuce to the hotel.

He could not do that, though, for the crowd in the station-yard surrounded the car and shouted for a speech. I gave them one, saying heaven knows what, except that their welcome made me ashamed of not having got down to the Pole, but please God I should get there next time or leave my bones on the way.

We got to the hotel at last (the same that my poor stricken darling had stayed at after her honeymoon), and as soon as we reached my room I locked the door and said:

"Now out with it. And please tell me everything."

Father Dan was the first to speak, but his pulpit style was too slow for me in my present stress of thoughts and feelings. He had hardly got further than his difference with his Bishop, and the oath he had sworn by him who died for us to come to London and never go back until he had found my darling, when I shook his old hand and looked towards the Sister.

She was quicker by a good deal, and in a few minutes I knew something of my dear one's story--how she had fled from home on my account, and for my sake had become poor; how she had lodged for a while in Bloomsbury; how hard she had been hit by the report of the loss of my ship; and how (Oh my poor, suffering, heroic, little woman!) she had disappeared on the approach of another event of still more serious consequence.

It was no time for modesty, not from me at all events, so while the Father's head was down, I asked plainly if there was a child, and was told there was, and the fear of having it taken from her (I could understand that) was perhaps the reason my poor darling had hidden herself away.

"And now, when, where, and by whom was she seen last?" I asked.

"Last week, and again to-day, to-night, here in the West End--by a fallen woman," answered the Sister.

"And what conclusion do you draw from that?"

The Sister hesitated for a moment and then said:

"That her child is dead; that she does not know you are alive; and that she is throwing herself away, thinking there is nothing left to live for."

"What?" I cried. "You believe that? Because she left that brute of a husband ... and because she came to me ... you believe that she could... . Never! Not Mary O'Neill! She would beg her bread, or die in the streets first."

I dare say my thickening voice was betraying me; but when I looked at Mildred and saw the tears rolling down her cheeks and heard her excuses (it was "what hundreds of poor women were driven to every day"), I was ashamed and said so, and she put her kind hand in my hand in token of her forgiveness.

"But what's to be done now?" she asked.

O'Sullivan was for sending for the police, but I would not hear of that.

I was beginning to feel as I used to do when I lost a comrade in a blizzard down south, and (without a fact or a clue to guide me) sent a score of men in a broad circle from the camp (like spokes in a wheel) to find him or follow back on their tracks.

There were only four of us, but I mapped out our courses, where we were to go, when we were to return, and what we were to do if any of us found my lost one--take her to Sister's flat, which she gave the address of.

It was half-past eleven when we started on our search, and I dare say our good old Father Dan, after his fruitless journeys, thought it a hopeless quest. But I had found myself at last. My spirits which had been down to zero had gone up with a bound. I had no ghost of an idea that I had been called home from the 88th latitude for nothing. And I had no fear that I had come too late.

Call it frenzy if you like--I don't much mind what people call it. But I was as sure as I have ever been of anything in this life, or ever expect to be, that the sufferings of my poor martyred darling were at an end, and that within an hour I should be holding her in my arms.

M.C.

[END OF MARTIN CONRAD'S MEMORANDUM]

ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTH CHAPTER

There must be a physical power in fierce emotion to deprive us of the use of our senses of hearing and even of sight, for my memory of what happened after I left the Jew's has blank places in it.

Trying to recall the incidents of that night is like travelling on a moorland road under a flying moon, with sometimes the whitest light in which everything is clearly seen, and then the blackest darkness.

I remember taking the electric car going west, and seeing the Whitechapel Road shooting by me, with its surging crowds of pedestrians, its public-houses, its Cinema shows, and its Jewish theatres.

I remember getting down at Aldgate Pump, and walking through that dead belt of the City, which, lying between east and west, is alive like a beehive by day and silent and deserted by night.

I remember seeing an old man, with a face like a rat's, picking up cigar-ends from the gutters before the dark Banks, and then a flock of sheep bleating before a barking dog as they were driven through the echoing streets from the river-side towards the slaughter-houses near Smithfield Market.

I remember that when I came to St. Paul's the precincts of the cathedral were very quiet and the big clock was striking nine. But on Ludgate Hill the traffic was thick, and when I reached Fleet Street crowds of people were standing in front of the newspaper offices, reading large placards in written characters which were pasted on the windows.

I remember that I did not look at these placards, thinking their news was nothing to me, who had not seen a newspaper for months and for whom the world was now eclipsed, but that as I stepped round one of the crowds, which extended to the middle of the street, somebody said:

"He has landed at Southampton, it seems."