John Silence smiled his inscrutable smile.  “Profoundly,” he answered, “and as simply as only primitive souls can love.  If only they both come to realise it in their normal waking states his Double will cease these nocturnal excursions.  He will be cured, and at rest.”

The words had hardly left his lips when there was a sound of rustling branches on our left, and the very next instant the dense brushwood parted where it was darkest and out rushed the swift form of an animal at full gallop.  The noise of feet was scarcely audible, but in that utter stillness I heard the heavy panting breath and caught the swish of the low bushes against its sides.  It went straight towards Joan—­and as it went the girl lifted her head and turned to meet it.  And the same instant a canoe that had been creeping silently and unobserved round the inner shore of the lagoon, emerged from the shadows and defined itself upon the water with a figure at the middle thwart.  It was Maloney.

It was only afterwards I realised that we were invisible to him where we stood against the dark background of trees; the figures of Joan and the animal he saw plainly, but not Dr. Silence and myself standing just beyond them.  He stood up in the canoe and pointed with his right arm.  I saw something gleam in his hand.

“Stand aside, Joan girl, or you’ll get hit,” he shouted, his voice ringing horribly through the deep stillness, and the same instant a pistol-shot cracked out with a burst of flame and smoke, and the figure of the animal, with one tremendous leap into the air, fell back in the shadows and disappeared like a shape of night and fog.  Instantly, then, Joan opened her eyes, looked in a dazed fashion about her, and pressing both hands against her heart, fell with a sharp cry into my arms that were just in time to catch her.

And an answering cry sounded across the lagoon—­thin, wailing, piteous.  It came from Sangree’s tent.

“Fool!” cried Dr. Silence, “you’ve wounded him!” and before we could move or realise quite what it meant, he was in the canoe and half-way across the lagoon.

Some kind of similar abuse came in a torrent from my lips, too—­though I cannot remember the actual words—­as I cursed the man for his disobedience and tried to make the girl comfortable on the ground.  But the clergyman was more practical.  He was spreading his coat over her and dashing water on her face.

“It’s not Joan I’ve killed at any rate,” I heard him mutter as she turned and opened her eyes and smiled faintly up in his face.  “I swear the bullet went straight.”

Joan stared at him; she was still dazed and bewildered, and still imagined herself with the companion of her trance.  The strange lucidity of the somnambulist still hung over her brain and mind, though outwardly she appeared troubled and confused.

“Where has he gone to?  He disappeared so suddenly, crying that he was hurt,” she asked, looking at her father as though she did not recognise him.  “And if they’ve done anything to him—­they have done it to me too—­for he is more to me than—­”