“‘I could not,’ he answered.  ’In the old days you had spoken so much of Scilly—­every island reminded me—­and I saw you every day.’

“I could read the thought passing through her mind.  It would not serve for her to live beside them, visible to them each day.  Sooner or later they would come to grips.  And then her face flushed as the notion of her great sacrifice came to her.

“‘I see but the one way,’ she said.  ’I will go into the house that you, Robert, have built.  Neither you nor John shall see me, but none the less, I shall live between you, holding you apart, as my hands do now.  I give my life to you so truly that from this night no one shall see my face.  You, John, shall live on here at Merchant’s Point.  Robert, you at your cottage, and every day you will bring me food and water and leave it at my door.’

“The two men fell back shamefaced.  They protested they would part and put the world between them; but she would not trust them.  I think, too, the notion of her sacrifice grew on her as she thought of it.  For women are tenacious of sacrifice even as men are of revenge.  And in the end she had her way.  That night Robert Lovyes nailed the boards across the windows, and brought the door-key back to her; and that night, twenty years ago, she crossed the threshold.  No man has seen her since.  But, none the less, for twenty years she has lived between the brothers, keeping them apart.”

This was the story which Mr. Wyeth told me as we sat over our pipes, and the next day I set off on my journey back to London.  The conclusion of the affair I witnessed myself.  For a year later we received a letter from Mr. Robert, asking that a large sum of money should be forwarded to him.  Being curious to learn the reason for his demand, I carried the sum to Tresco myself.  Mr. John Lovyes had died a month before, and I reached the island on Mr. Robert’s wedding-day.  I was present at the ceremony.  He was now dressed in a manner which befitted his station—­an old man bent and bowed, but still handsome, and he bore upon his arm a tall woman, grey-haired and very pale, yet with the traces of great beauty.  As the parson laid her hand in her husband’s, I heard her whisper to him, “Dust to Dust.”

KEEPER OF THE BISHOP.

For a fortnight out of every six weeks the little white faced man walked the garrison on St. Mary’s Island in a broadcloth frock-coat, a low waistcoat and a black riband of a tie fastened in a bow; and it gave him great pleasure to be mistaken for a commercial traveller.  But during the other four weeks he was head-keeper of the lighthouse on the Bishop’s Rock, with thirty years of exemplary service to his credit.  By what circumstances he had been brought to enlist under the Trinity flag I never knew.  But now, at the age of forty-eight he was entirely occupied with a great horror of the sea and its hunger for the bodies of men; the frock-coat which he wore during his spells on shore was a protest against the sea; and he hated not only the sea but all things that were in the sea, especially rock lighthouses, and of all rock lighthouses especially the Bishop.