Too imperceptibly for him to have noticed the progress of it, the light had strengthened in the chart-room, for a stormy sun had penetrated the gloom, and the heavy black letters stood out distinctly on the yellowed page. A sudden flash of memory leapt through Elderkin's mind--the memory of a day long ago in his childhood. He had been brought up in New England by a rigid old grandmother until he ran away to sea, his Nova Scotian blood too strong for him. But his mother's Puritan strain was with him nevertheless, had held by him if in nothing else but a certain Biblical flavour in his oaths. Now there flashed across his mind a dreary Sunday when he was a little boy--one of many like it, but this particular one had stuck in his memory. And, probably because of the yellow light flooding the chart-room, the memory surged up at him, for on that Sunday he had escaped to the barn, although with no better spoils than a book of Old Testament stories, and lain there, heels in the air and elbows on the straw, reading the story of the Flood in just such a stormy yellow glow as this. A gale had followed, rain-laden, and his childish mind had half-feared, half-hoped, that a flood was coming, down which he could float triumphantly in some makeshift ark . . . as to his grandmother, he might rescue her and he might not, but if he did, of course, she would be so overcome with gratitude and admiration that she would never again abase his dignity with a certain limber cane. Then, in a lull of the gale, the gleam had shone out once more, and by its light he read on; read how God had promised there should never come a flood over all the earth again, and had made a rainbow as a sign of it. Rather dull of God, he thought in his disappointment. The storm raged so that he dared not slip back to the house, not because of any fear of the elements, but because his grandmother would notice if his clothes got wet; so he had stayed on, his mind thronged with imaginary adventures, till the storm was over. Then he had gone back to the house, feeling curiously flat after the excitement wind always produced in him. A faint yet, pictorially, a vivid memory of that strained hour of varying emotions swept across him now in a moment's space, as he gazed at the page before him. The next moment he understood why--it was not only the light that reproduced that afternoon of long ago, but also the words at which he was looking--the two things together had fused a section of time from thirty years earlier into a section of the present. He read the verses through, but a few phrases knocked at his mind to the exclusion of the rest. The word "covenant," especially, so hard upon his pact with Lemaire, seemed to stare up at him. . . .