THE EPILOGUE.
There are always a few inquiring persons who, at the conclusion of any story, insist upon being told "what happened after that." And if such a question is ever justified, it is so in the case of a narrative that, as in the present instance, ends almost at the precise moment at which it began.
So it is not impossible that some readers may be sufficiently interested to wish to know the particular effect produced upon Peter Tourmalin's subsequent conduct by a vision more than usually complicated and connected.
Did he receive it, for example, as a solemnly prophetic warning, and forswear all female society while on board the Boomerang? or was he rather prompted to prove its fallibility by actual experience?
As to the motives which guided him, we are unable to speak with confidence, and they must be left to be accounted for by the reader's knowledge of human nature in general, and Peter's, so far as it has been self-revealed by his unconscious imagination in these pages, in particular.
But the author is in a position to state with certainty that, when Sophia and her mother met the ship, as they duly did at Gibraltar, nothing on Peter's part gave them the slightest ground for suspecting that he was on terms of even the most distant acquaintanceship with either Miss Tyrrell or Miss Davenport, and that the fact of his being far advanced in the third volume of Buckle's History of Civilization seemed to guarantee that he had employed his spare time on board the vessel both wisely and well.
Nor did he get into any difficulties by circulating gossip concerning any matron from Melbourne, owing to the circumstance that there was no lady passenger who at all answered the description. She, like much else in his experiences, was purely a creation of the curry.
Lastly, it may be added that Peter is now married to his Sophia, and is far happier than even he could have expected. She tempers her intellectuality out of consideration for his mental bareness; and as yet he has never found her society in the least oppressive, nor has his errant fancy wandered back in any perfidious sense to the time he spent, when freed from her supervision, on board the Boomerang.
THE END.