Page:The Great Secret.djvu/284

268 "The baroness and Dennis, the brute. Ha! ha! they should be both dead enough now, comrades, yet they stand there grinning and say I did it for selfish motives, and I give them both the lie direct. Send for my wife, the poor victim whose fortune I first gave up. She was not one of us, and yet did so much to help us. She can vouch for my honesty and good faith to my oath, even if she cannot say much for my affection and consideration for her. Send for Adela. Where is she, since the others are here?"

"She also is here to help you still in all she can, although she never was your wife."

"Would that she had never been my wife, for her own sake and mine also at this bitter hour," muttered the dying man huskily. "I did her the greatest wrong that man can do to woman, yet it was for the Cause—the Cause only that I did that wrong."

"I forgive you for what you have done to me."

"Then all the rest counts as nothing to me."

The shark still waited at his post, waited for that last man, and the little boat, gaping now at every seam, was more than half-filled with water, for there was no one now to bail out. The dying man had slid from his seat, and now reclined with his head against it and his attenuated and shrunken body submerged. He seemed to have shrank to two-thirds of his former size, so that the shark would not get much of a feast for all his patience after the boat sank, yet he knew, with that unfailing instinct, as he watched the gunwale come down nearer to the surface of the water, that the long-deferred moment was approaching, and he drew closer, with his small attendant, the mackerel-like pilot-fish.