He could not rest, and soon resumed his sentinel tramp along the shore. There for hours he walked, the breakers counting his moments drearily. The horizon all to seaward was a black line, and over it the sky was lurid blankness; it did not tempt the voyaging hope to circle ocean, chasing distant dawn. He could not seek a refuge for his miserable hopelessness in that reasoning with the infinite called prayer. Was it to make him happy or content that men, questioning the infinite and receiving for all answer, “Mystery!” had essayed for themselves to interpret this dim oracle and had feigned to find that sorrows and agonies are strengthening blessings? So the happy and the placid say: so say not the lonely and bereaved. Pain is an accursed wrong, for all our self-beguiling and self-flattery in its lulls. This was a man of thorough, tested manhood. There was no experience that educates the body and the mind which he had not proved. All this preparation was done; he was facing the duties of his full manhood. And now that was to happen, that sorrow he knew must come, which would make every effort joyless, every achievement a vanity, every belief a doubt, every day sick for its coming night of darkness, and every morn sad for its uninvited dawning and eager for speedy night. As he moved along the shore, he was aware again, as on the previous night, of a shadow lurking in the dimness. “Possibly a mischief-maker,” he thought, and half-concealing himself, he waited to watch. The figure approached--a man. He stepped forward to meet him in the moonlight. “Paulding!” “Dunstan!” The two friends had not met since the picnic. Paulding knew, only as everyone now knew, that his friend and Diana were engaged. He therefore could conceive why there was one night wanderer by the shore. In a few passionate words, he told Dunstan his own secret--the secret of his sorrowful unrest. He, too, loved Diana. “My dear friend,” said Dunstan tenderly, as the other sobbed and was silent, “I have seemed almost a traitor to you and if I could have dreamed of this, I would have even violated my pledge to tell you before what I now can tell permittedly. I was too busy with my own happiness in recovering Diana to think of any other man or woman.” “Recovering her?” repeated Paulding. “Then you had already met----”