“Exile is a barren soil to most of us,” said Clide. “We generally prove a failure in it.” “I suppose because we are a failure when we come to it,” replied Raymond. “We seldom try exile until life has failed to us at home.” He looked up with a quick smile as he said this, and Clide answered him with a glance of intelligent and respectful sympathy. As the two men looked into each other’s face, it was as if some intangible barrier were melting away, and confidence were suddenly being established in its place. Clide had never pronounced his wife’s name since the day he had let his head drop on the admiral’s breast, and abandoned himself to the passion of his boyish grief. It was as if the recollection of his marriage and its miserable ending had died and been buried with Isabel. The admiral had often wondered how one so young could be so self-contained, wrapping himself in such an impenetrable reserve. The old sailor was not given to speculating on mental phenomena as a rule; but he had given this particular one many a five minutes’ cogitation, and the conclusion he arrived at was that either Clide had taken the matter less to heart than he imagined, and so felt no need of the solace of talking over his loss, or that the sense of humiliation which attached to the memory of Isabel was so painful to him, as a man and a De Winton, that he was unwilling to recur to it. There may have been something of this latter feeling mixed up with the other impalpable causes that kept him mute; but to-day, as he paced up and down under the fragrant shade of the lime-trees with M. de la Bourbonais, a sudden desire sprang up in him to speak of the past, and evoke the sympathy of this man, who had suffered, perhaps, more deeply than himself. They were silent for a few minutes, but a subtle, magnetic sympathy was at work between them. “I too have had my little glimpse of paradise, only to be turned out, like so many others, to finish my pilgrimage alone,” said Raymond abruptly. “No, not alone,” retorted Clide; “you have a daughter, who must be a great delight to you.” “Ah! you are right. I was ungrateful to say alone; but you can understand that that other solitude can never be filled up. That is to say,” he added, looking up with a brightening expression in his keen eyes, that sparkled under projecting brows, made more prominent by bushy black eyebrows, “not at my age; at yours it is different. When sorrow comes to a man at the close of his half-century, it is too late to plant again; he cannot begin life anew. There is no future for him but courage and resignation. But at your age everything is a beginning. While we are young, no matter how dark the sky is, the future looks bright; to-morrow is always full of hope and glad surprises when we are young.” “I don’t feel as if I were young,” said Clide; “it seems to me as if I had outlived my youth. You know there are experiences that do the work of years quite as well as time; that make us old prematurely?”