As the dawn flushed in the east the girl on the bed sat up, looked at the two weary figures, the dying lamp, and like a ghost stole by them. When the clear sunlight at last roused them she had not come back. CHAPTER XVI. IN THE WOODS OF PARADISE. “Drink to the men that were broken! They were better men than you.” Scorching morning sun on a barren point of rock and sand, and on great waves that thudded and broke emerald-green and white on the wet beach; and nothing else to tell of the past night’s storm. Nothing, unless if any one had shaded their eyes to gaze at the beach, where the hot air quivered, they might have seen a huddled thing lying there just out of the reach of the waves; a thing that last night had been a man, and to-day--motionless, lax, it seemed but the body that some one had cast aside. If something did move in the bushes, it did not disturb that quiet sleeper in the sun. “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.” Brian Heriot had been put into the Guards at twenty, had lived as gaily as if money grew on every bush, till the crash came and undeceived him. His father died without a will, and his elder brothers quietly threw him over. The new Lord Heriot was a Plymouth brother and a philanthropist; he had no money to waste on idle young butterflies in the Guards. The Honorable Brian Heriot grinned without much mirth when he realized his position. He disgusted his dear friends by calmly taking what little money he had to pay his debts, and then, without a word to any one, quietly “went under.” His old haunts knew him no more; people forgot him, no one troubling to remember that if Lord Heriot was a pious prig, Brian, his brother, was a born adventurer. Strange lands, strange occupations knew him. He grew very tanned, very handsome, with a look in his face that made women turn their heads as he passed. But he made no money, only kept body and soul together; a rolling stone that yet did not go down-hill. For he kept his soft speech and manner, his good heart that hated cruelty and a lie. Somehow he had drifted to Fayal, and there being penniless, if cheerful, had shipped on a small coasting-vessel that gathered cargo for the European steamers. That was a week ago. This morning there was neither vessel, cargo, nor crew; nothing but Brian Heriot washed ashore almost dead. He had swum till he could swim no more; that was all he knew. That, and a great crashing of water, and utter darkness. But the very wave that had stunned him had cast him high and dry like a bit of driftwood on the sandy point where he lay. As the sun warmed him he stirred, ever so faintly.