This was how he sustained the first physical shock of the intimation which poor Lady Frankland had made to him with so much distress and compunction. It is hard enough at any time to receive a sentence of death; yet Colin could have died bravely had that been all that was required of him. It was the life in death thus suddenly presented before his eyes that appalled his soul and made his heart sick. And after that, Heaven knows, there were other considerations still more hard to encounter. If we were to say that the young man thus stopped short in the heyday of his life bethought himself immediately of what is called preparation for dying, it would be false and foolish. Colin had a desperate passage to make before he came to that. As these moments, which were like hours, passed on, he came to consider the matter in its larger aspects. But for Harry Frankland he would have been in no danger, and now Harry Frankland was safe, strong, and in the full enjoyment of his life, while Colin lay broken and helpless, shipwrecked at the beginning of his career. Why was it? Had God ordained this horrible injustice, this cruel fate? As Colin looked at it, out of the clouds that were closing round him, that fair career which was never to be accomplished stretched bright before him, as noble a future as ever was contemplated by man. It had its drawbacks and disadvantages when he looked at it a week before, and might, perhaps, have turned out a common-place life enough had it come to its daily fulfilment; but now, when it had suddenly become impossible, what a career it seemed! Not of selfish profit, of money-making, or personal advantage--a life which was to be for the use of his country, for the service of his Church, for the furtherance of everything that was honest and lovely, and of good report. He stood here, stayed upon the threshold of his life, and looked at it with wonder and despair. This existence God had cut short and put an end to. Why? That another man might live and enjoy his common-place pleasures--might come into possession of all the comforts of the world, might fill a high position without knowing, without caring for it; might hunt, and shoot, and fall asleep after dinner as his father had done before him. In the great darkness Colin’s heart cried out with a cry of anguish and terrible surprise to the invisible, inexorable God, “Why? Why?” Was one of His creatures less dear, less precious to Him than another, that He should make this terrible difference? The pure life, the high hopes, the human purpose and human happiness, were they as nothing to the great Creator who had brought them into being and suffered them to bud and blossom only that He might crush them with His hands? Colin lay still in his bed, with his lips set close and his eyes straining into that unfathomable darkness. The bitterness of death took possession of his soul--a bitterness heavier, more terrible than that of death. His trust, his faith, had given way.