“All my voyage from Europe homeward, there was droning in my ears the monotonous refrain of a sad Spanish song, ‘Se acabò para mi l’esperanza.’ I heard it in the gale, the moment our schooner struck, and I thought ‘now the old earthly hopes are dead with my death, and new hopes of other lives shall be.’ As I lay in my trance, all the old bitterness passed away, and the old hopes grew fresh and confident again as in happy days before disappointment; and then the presence that was the joy of those days came near, and I seemed to have attained to dearest death and to a moment of heaven that should interpret all the cruel mysteries of existence. And I seemed to hear again the voice that flowed so deliciously through my youth and made my heart first know what heart-beats mean. But it was not death I had attained, only a vision, such as my waking life could never have, and when I really woke again in Dempster’s house, it was to the melancholy of the same refrain, ‘Se acabò para mi l’esperanza.’” For a moment more he sat and stared down into the street with heavy eyes that saw not--what was it brought before him the face of Sally Bishop and beside it another face, her face---- He shook himself impatiently and cast his dark thoughts from him. CHAPTER XIII THE READER IS PRESENTED TO TWO CHARMING GIRLS, AND SO IS MAJOR GRANBY And now while a certain Peter Skerrett, stupendous wag, who is in town for a day or two and has been presented to Mr. Waddy by old Budlong, is showing the returned nabob through streets of deserted houses and telling him the necessary protective scandals about their owners:---- And while at Newport, in the society of De Châteaunéant, Tim Budlong is subscribing more freely than ever, and the Budlong ladies are quivering through the _ter-diurnal_ shift of toilets resplendent:---- And while Sally Bishop, who has heard from her father how he had sold the black to a Mr. Ira Waddy, just returned from India, is dying with something on her mind which she dare not yet reveal:---- And while Horace Belden is beating his bolting horse and training another, to which he naturally gives the name of Knockknees, to run, and no doubt to win purses, and is nursing his finances for an August at Newport with its possible heiress:---- And while Miss Sullivan, at her lovely cottage opposite Belden’s, is singing duets with Mrs. Cecilia Tootler, to whom, though that lady has often spoken of the delightful visit of Mr. Waddy, her friend, she has never yet mentioned her share in the rescue of a person of that name:---- While all our acquaintances are busied thus, Major Granby, at Halifax, boards a Cunarder, embarked for Boston. As he mounted the plank, a young excessively English man defended the gangway with open fist. The major won his entrance by grasping the fist in amicable guise. “Why, how d’ye do, Ambient?” he said to his compatriot, a pleasant-faced pinkling. “So you have really started on your travels.”