some old barges and other vessels, which some one, at some remote period, had been breaking up, stood up gaunt against the sky. Some darker object, among some broken timbers at the very edge of the water, attracted his attention; he went forward quickly, and then, with a half-suppressed cry, threw himself on his knees beside it.

It was the body of a man, who had apparently fallen just where he had been struck down; the hand which Philip Crowdy touched was quite warm, although the man was stone dead. But that was not the strange part—that was not the reason why the living man, bending close above the dead, stared at the face as though he could never gaze enough.

The faces that stared so grimly, in that desolate spot, into each other—the dead and the living—were alike in every particular, down to the smallest detail; it was as though the living man gazed into a mirror, which threw back every line, even every faint touch of colouring, in his own face.

“Dandy Chater!” whispered Crowdy to himself in an awed voice. “So, I’ve found you at last!”