There was no thrill of patriotic rapture in the breast of either traveller as he watched yonder well-known light brightening on the dark horizon. Leonard had left his country too often to feel any deep emotion at returning to it. He had none of those strong feelings which mark a man as the son of the soil, and make it seem to him that he belongs to one spot of earth, and can neither live nor die happily anywhere else. The entire globe was his country, a world created for him to roam about in, climbing all its hills, shooting in all its forests, fishing in all its rivers, exhausting all the sport and amusement that was to be had out of it--and with no anchor to chain him down to any given spot. Yet, though he had none of the deep feeling of the exile returning to the country of his birth, he was not without emotion as he saw the Lizard light broadening and yellowing under the pale beams of a young moon. He was thinking of his wife--the wife whose face he had not seen since that gloomy morning at Mount Royal, when she sat pale and calm in her place at the head of his table--maintaining her dignity as the mistress of his house, albeit he knew her heart was breaking. From the hour of her return from the Kieve, they had been parted. She had kept her room, guarded by Jessie; and he had been told, significantly, that it was not well they should meet. How would she receive him now? What were her thoughts and feelings about that dead man? The man whom she had loved and he had hated: not only because his wife loved him--though that reason was strong enough for hatred--but because the man was in every attribute so much his own superior. Never had Leonard Tregonell felt such keen anxiety as he felt now, when he speculated upon his wife's greeting--when he tried to imagine how they two would feel and act standing face to face after nearly a year of severance. The correspondence between them had been of the slightest. For the first six months his only home-letters had been from Miss Bridgeman--curt, business-like communications--telling him of his boy's health and general progress, and of any details about the estate which it was his place to be told. Of Christabel she wrote as briefly as possible. "Mrs. Tregonell is a little better." "Mrs. Tregonell is gradually regaining strength." "The doctor considers Mrs. Tregonell much improved," and so on. Later there had been letters from Christabel--letters written in Switzerland--in which the writer confined herself almost entirely to news of the boy's growth and improvement, and to the particulars of their movements from one place to another--letters which gave not the faintest indication of the writer's frame of mind: as devoid of sentiment as an official communication from one legation to another.