impulsive manner, the brightness of her talk and the sweetness of her laugh, there was no more light-hearted girl in England that night. I alone, perhaps, in all that room, could tell myself that she carried a heavy burden, and would escape from it by force majeure of an indomitable will. Her talk I found vapid to the point of hysteria. She told me that she was half French and half American—“just which you like to call me.” When I had danced twice with her she presented me to her father, General Fordibras—a fine military figure of a man, erect and manly, and gifted with eyes which many a woman must have remembered. These things I observed at a glance, but that which I was presently to see escaped my notice for some minutes. General Fordibras, it appears, had but three fingers to his left hand.

force majeure

I say that I observed the fact negligently, and did not for the moment take full cognizance of its singularity. Alone in my chambers at the Albany, later on, I lighted my pipe and asked myself some sane questions. A man who had lost a finger of his left hand was not such a wonder, surely, that I could make much of it. And yet that sure instinct, which has never failed me in ten years of strenuous investigation, refused stubbornly to pass the judgment by. Again in imagination I stood upon Palling beach and looked upon the figure of the dead sailor. The great sea had cast him out—for what? The black paper, did not an avenging destiny write the words upon it? “Captain Three Fingers!” Was I a madman, then, to construct a story for myself and to say, “To-night I have seen the man whom the dead served. I have shaken him by the hand. I have asked him to my house”? Time will answer that question for good or ill. I know but this—that, sitting there alone at the dead of night, I seemed to be groping, not in a house, or a room, or a street, but over the whole world itself for the momentous truth. None could share that secret with me. The danger and the ecstasy of it alike were my own.

Who was this General Fordibras, and what did the daughter know of his life? I have written that I invited them both to my house in Suffolk, and thither they came in the spring of the year. Okyada, the shrewdest servant that ever earned the love and gratitude of an affectionate master, could not help me to identify the General. We had never met him in our travels, never heard of him, could not locate him. I concluded that he was just what he pretended to be so far as his birth and parentage were concerned—a Frenchman naturalised in America; a rich man to boot, and the owner of the steam yacht Connecticut, as he himself had told me. 

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