hopelessly shut in to the little circle of my own sensations, desires, and emotions. Owen, whom I knew better than any other boy,――what, after all, did I know of him? I knew no one but myself, and of myself I knew much that filled me with shame. A deep silence overshadowed all things, the silence of the fallen snow. I had come to a stand-still. Around me was an infinite stretch of whiteness, almost unbroken, save where the sea was dark and restless under the whip of the rising wind. Dusk had crept up imperceptibly, and more light now rose from the ground than fell from the leaden sky overhead. Snow had again begun to fall. A few flakes turned and fluttered down out of the darkness, but I knew this was only the beginning. I walked to the edge of the black, desolate sea, and watched the waves rolling in to break at my feet, and at that moment I felt infinitely alone, and indeed for miles round there was probably no other human being. But it was as if I were alone in a dead world. The whirling flakes of snow fell ever faster out of the winter sky; the barren, frozen land was wrapped in a stillness that was more like the stillness of death than of sleep; the only sounds there were came from the waves breaking at my feet, and from an occasional sweep of wind forlorn as though no ears were there to listen. The creeping on of night seemed to be the shutting out for ever of all life, and one could imagine there would never be anything more, that the end had at last been reached. And the thought of death came to me, without terror, came, rather, as a solution. All that bound me to existence seemed now attenuated to the thinnest cobweb. If I just lay down here and waited.... Tony, who had grown restless at my long delay, suddenly broke into my consciousness. He began to urge me to come on, with a peculiar, eager, discontented note in his voice. He jumped up with his large paws against me. I knelt in the snow and hugged him in my arms, while his warm red tongue passed rapidly over my face. I held him close, and his black nose was pressed into my cheek, and he wagged his tail and nibbled at my ears. CHAPTER XXXII