His nephew taken from him, there remained to Daniel nothing but tavern friends, and the dull round of daily labour, and old age, cheerless, lonely, creeping towards him apace, athwart the dust and turmoil of his life. While Daniel walked, purposeless, on the dreary road, or stood listless, and hopeless, on the quiet jetty, Harold Jerningham sat alone in his own apartment, and pondered on the events that had befallen him. A son, found and lost--found only in the very hour of his loss. What chastisement of offended God--or blind, unconscious destiny, gigantic Nemesis, with mighty, brazen arms, revolving, machine-like, on its pivot, striking at random into space, and striking _sometimes_ strangely to the purpose--what chastisement could have seemed more fitting than this? “I would have bartered half my fortune, or twenty years of my life, for a son,” he said to himself. “How often I have envied the field-labourer his troop of rosy brats--the gipsy tramp her brown-faced baby! Fate put a barren sceptre in my hand. If my wife had given me a son, I think I should have loved her. And I had a son all the time--a son whom I might have legitimated, since his mother lived as my acknowledged wife on this Scottish ground. Yes, I would have set the lawyers to work, and we would have made him heir of Greenlands, and Ripley, and Pendarvoch. I would have given him the girl who loves him--whom I have loved. It would be no shame to resign her to my son--my younger, better self. And we met--that unknown son and I--and we held scornfully aloof from each other, with instinctive dislike. Dislike? It was dislike which needed but a word to melt into love. In a stranger, this reflection of my youth was an impertinence--a plagiarism. In my son it must be the strongest claim upon my love. My son! It needs not the agreement of dates to confirm his kindred. His paternity is written upon his face.” And then to Mr. Jerningham also there came the thought that had come to Daniel Mayfield. That face in life he was never more to see. Should he even look upon it in death--changed, disfigured by the fierce destruction of the waves. Even to see it thus was almost too much to hope. To reclaim the dead, so lost, would be well nigh as impossible as it had been to save the living. CHAPTER XV. STRONGER THAN DEATH. THE day that followed was even more utterly blank and hopeless than the last. Mr. Jerningham had sent scouts in every direction, and both from him and Daniel the men had received promises of liberal reward for any tidings of the lost one. But no tidings came. The men returned, dispirited and weary; and at the close of this second blank, wasted day, fairly confessed that they could do no more. So the night closed; and the sleepless hours wore away in a house of mourning and desolation.