He stared about him sullenly.  “Curse them!” he said aloud.  “Why could they not have died and rotted before we heard of them?”

Dorthe, at the sound of a human voice, sprang to her feet with a cry.  The man, too, gave a cry—­the ecstatic cry of the unwilling hermit who looks again upon the human face.

“Dorthe!  Thou?  I thought thou wast dead—­drowned in the sea.”

Dorthe had forgotten the meaning of words, but her name came to her familiarly.  Then something stirred within her, filling her eyes with tears.  She went forward and touched the stranger, drawing her hand over his trembling arms.

“Do you not remember me, Dorthe?” asked the man, softly.  “I am the priest—­was, for I am not fit for the priesthood now.  I have forgotten how to pray.”

She shook her head, but smiling, the instinct of gregariousness awakening.

He remembered his needs, and made a gesture which she understood.  She took his hand, and led him from the forest to her cave.  She struck fire from flint into a heap of fagots beneath a swinging pot.  In a little time she set before him a savoury mess of birds.  He ate of it ravenously.  Dorthe watched him with deep curiosity.  She had never seen hunger before.  She offered him a gourd of water, and he drank thirstily.  When he raised his face his cheeks were flushed, his eyes brighter.

He took her hand and drew her down beside him.

“I must talk,” he said.  “Even if you cannot understand, I must talk to a human being.  I must tell some one the story of these awful years.  The very thought intoxicates me.  We were shipwrecked, Dorthe.  The wind drove us out of our course, and we went to pieces on the rocks at the foot of this island.  Until to-night I did not know that it was this island.  I alone was washed on shore.  In the days that came I grew to wish that I, too, had perished.  You know nothing of what solitude and savagery mean to the man of civilization—­and to the man of ambition.  Oh, my God!  I dared not leave the shore lest I miss the chance to signal a passing vessel.  There was scarcely anything to maintain life on that rocky coast.  Now and again I caught a seagull or a fish.  Sometimes I ventured inland and found fruit, running back lest a ship should pass.  There I stayed through God knows how many months and years.  I fell ill many times.  My limbs are cramped and twisted with rheumatism.  Finally, I grew to hate the place beyond endurance.  I determined to walk to the other end of the island.  It was only when I passed, now and again, the unburied dead and the pottery that I suspected I might be on your island.  Oh, that ghastly company!  When night came, they seemed to rise and walk before me.  I cried aloud and cursed them.  My manhood has gone, I fear.  I cannot tell how long that terrible journey lasted,—­months and months, for my feet are bare and my legs twisted.  What kind fate guided me to you?”

He gazed upon her, not as man looks at woman, but as mortal looks adoringly upon the face of mortal long withheld.