But he did not go. For one thing, his lameness hindered him; for another, there was something almost too ghastly even for him in the thought. But as he sat brooding and thinking of it all out in the cold and the darkness of the night, well might he have been taken for the very spirit of the storm, sitting wild-eyed and sullenly triumphant in the midst of all this destruction, gloating over the death of his fellow-men, and picturing the ghastly details with the fascination of a mind on the verge of madness. Suddenly an object floating in the water, quite near to the vessel, took his eyes, and roused him from his lethargy. In another moment his experienced and cat-like eyes had grasped its outline, and he knew what it was. A human creature--a man, in all probability--supported in the water by a life-belt, for he could see the outlines of head and shoulders above the crests of the waves. Well could Saul guess what had happened. This man--sailor or passenger, whichever he might be--had been on deck when the ship struck. He had had the good fortune and presence of mind to secure a life-belt about him during the few minutes that the ship kept above water, and probably struck out for shore when washed from the deck. In all probability he had quickly been dashed against the rocks and deprived of consciousness, and the ebb of the tide had dragged and sucked him back from the shore and in the direction of the wreck. A little more and he would be washed upon the shoals of treacherous quicksand--and then! A sudden fierce desire came upon Saul to see the face of this man. He was floating almost close to the wreck now, rising and falling upon the heaving waves without any motion save what they endowed him with. Saul turned and possessed himself of his lantern, and moving cautiously to the very edge of the wreck, turned the light full upon the floating object in the water. Then the silence of the night was rent by a wild and exceeding bitter cry; and in the midst of the darkness and terror of that winter’s night, the soul of Saul Tresithny suddenly awoke, amid throbs of untold anguish, from its long lethargy and death. In one moment of intense illumination, in which for a moment he seemed wrapped in flame--scorched by a remorse and despair that was in essence different from anything he had experienced hitherto, he saw his past life and the crime of the night in a totally new aspect. It was a moment not to be analysed, not to be described; but the impression was such that its memory was graven on his mind ever after in characters of fire. It was as if in that awful moment something within him had died and something been born. Heart and soul, for those few brief seconds in which he stood mute and paralysed with horror, were crowded with all the bitterness of death and the pangs of birth. Yet it was scarce five seconds that the spell held him in its thrall. What was it that he saw in that heaving waste of waters?