With eyes at rest upon the dreaming sea the young Antonio recalled some of the hours he had spent sitting upon this same cork bench. All of them had not been hours of peace. Antonio remembered March nights of storm, when mountainous waves uplifted white crests in the cold shine of a racing moon. He remembered August dusks, when the thunder pounded and boomed like great guns, or like enormous breakers on a sandy shore, while the lightning unsheathed its blinding blade, bright and jagged as a scimitar. He remembered December gales, with the pine-trees cowering and creaking before the blast; and January floods raging down the mountain. But, most vividly of all, Antonio recalled his hours of inward strife and tempest. He remembered that long night's vigil when he wrestled and prayed against a sudden temptation to renounce the religious life and go back to the warm, sweet world. And he remembered those many, many hours of less sultry, more nipping and stinging tempest when all the arguments against religion in general, and against monasticism in particular, went on bursting like hailstones about his head. Thrice during his novitiate and once more on the very eve of his full profession a tornado of doubt had well-nigh swung him off his feet and hurled him back into the world. But on this May night, within him and without, there was peace. Peace. Better still, there was peace at last in Antonio's beloved fatherland, in beautiful Portugal. For more than five-and-twenty years the garden of the West had lain under the blight of war. At the bidding of Wellington had not the peasantry laid waste their fields, so that there should be neither a blade of grass nor a cob of maize for Napoleon's horses and men? And after Napoleon was flung back had not the ancient kingdom sunk to be a mere colony of Brazil, with Englishmen lording it amid the ruins? Worse still, had not the fratricidal strife of the Absolutists and the Constitutionalists soaked Portugal's hill-sides with her best blood? But now the civil war was ended. Napier, the amazing Englishman, had done his work, and Dom Miguel's cause was lost. At Evora Monte, with the coming of May, the faithful remnant of sixteen thousand Miguelistas had broken their swords across their knees and dashed their muskets to pieces against the stones at the news of their betrayal by a selfish and ungrateful master.