And the picture of that hard-faced old man crying accompanied Paul Rivers to the upper decks, and remained insistently with him for a long time. It portrayed with such neat emphasis precisely what was so deplorably lacking in his own character. There, in concrete form, though not precisely his own case, still near enough to be extremely illuminating, he had seen a grown-up man finding abundant and natural expression for his emotion. The man was not ashamed of his tears, and would doubtless have let them splash on the deck before a hundred passengers, whereas he, Paul Rivers, was, it seemed, constitutionally unable to reveal himself, to tell his deep longings, to find expression through any sensible medium for the ten thousand dreams that choked his life to the brim. He was unable, perhaps ashamed, to splash on the deck. It was not that the big, bronzed Englishman wanted to cry, or to wash his soul in sentiment, but that the sight of this old man’s passion, and its frank and easy utterance, touched with dramatic intensity the crying need of his whole temperament. The need of the steerage passenger was the need of a moment; his own was the need of an existence. ‘Lucky devil!’ he exclaimed, half laughing, half sighing, as he went to his cabin for the field-glasses; ‘he knows how to get it out—and does get it out! while I—with my impossible yearnings and my absurd diffidence in speaking of them to others—I haven’t got a single safety-valve of any sort or kind. I can’t get it out of me—all this ocean in my heart and soul—not a drop, not even a blessed tear!’ He laughed again and, stooping to pick up the glasses, he caught a glimpse of his sunburned, bearded face in the cabin mirror. ‘Even my appearance is against me,’ he went on with mournful humour; ‘I look like a healthy lumberman more than anything else in God’s world!’ He bent forward and examined himself carefully in detail. ‘What has such a face as that to do with beauty, and the stars, and the moon sinking over a summer sea, or those night-winds I know rising faintly from their hiding-places in the dim forests and stealing on soft tiptoe about the sleeping world until the dawn gives them leave to run and sing? Yet _I_ know—though I can never tell it to another—what so many do not know! Who could ever believe that _that_ man’—he pointed to himself in the glass, laughing—‘wants above all else in life, above wealth, fame, success, the knowledge of spiritual things, which is Reality—which is God?’ A flash of light from nowhere ran over his face, making it for one instant like the face of a boy, shining, wonderful, radiantly young.