“I was thinking of those animals in the water and in the air, and, by analogy, the rest of the animal world. We all of us prey on something else, down to the ass who eats grass; or else we die.” “That’s a very sage remark, Pat. Have you been reading Schopenhauer lately, or is your bank account unhealthy?” Onslow laughed. “Was it pessimistic? I’m not given that way as a general thing. It’s so much pleasanter, for one’s self and everybody else, to look at matters from the cheerful point of view. But I was thinking at the time that if I’d been well off, and if other things had not happened as they did, my life would have been written very differently.” “You mean you might have been her Majesty’s Ambassador to the Court of Timbuctoo?” “Or something in that line, possibly—yes.” “Mabel,” said the girl, “is free now.” Onslow nodded dreamily, and once more let his gaze roam out across the waters. The boat rode uncared for over the gentle oily swells, and the sound of the surf crumbling on the distant keys fell on his ears, and droned to him a lingering tale of might-have-been. Mabel was free! The woman who had once promised to be his wife—the woman whose memory had driven him from pillar to post across the world through all those long, wild years, because his abiding love for her was too great a torment to be borne when he rested for a breathing space in one spot, and had time for thought. The woman who had, by pressure, been made to marry another man, whom neither on her wedding day nor at any after time did she ever love, was free again. Mabel Duvernay now, and Mabel Kildare no longer; but Mabel still, and free. CHAPTER XXI. THE CYCLONE. A shining-faced negro waiter came up in answer to the bell, and brought tumblers of tinkling ice and water. Both Onslow and Miss Kildare drank thirstily, and then lay back again in their cane chairs, panting. The close heat was something terrible. There was not a breath of either sea breeze or land breeze, and the electric fan which whirred on the table behind them did little more than send a blast of sickly warmth. Down the long line of the piazza were the rest of the people in the hotel, the men cursing and mopping their faces, the women with closed eyes fanning themselves languidly. And, overhead, the shingles of the roof crackled and rustled in the baking air as though they were alive. Night came, and the bell clashed out its summons to dinner, but no one went in. The wooden sides of the hotel, baked through and through by a month of tropical sun, had made the rooms unendurable. So they stayed where they were, in the hot, oppressive dark, and blinked at the white summer lightning which splashed the violet heavens in front of them. In heavy panting beats the night seemed to close down upon them and pen them in, so that it was a labor to breathe. “I can’t stand this,” said Miss Kildare at last.