All this was before the last abandonment to despair had overwhelmed us, Harry and me; and it was useful in helping us to a sort of fictitious endurance. We might have succumbed sooner, otherwise, and actually foregone our living rescue. He was so strong and hopeful; so certain that Destiny would not have led him thus far, by such tortured ways, only to see him founder when within sight of his goal, that some part of his faith could not fail to communicate itself to us with vital results. At the same time, I think, we shrunk from the merciless expression of his triumph. _Our_ concern, in revealing the truth as we supposed it, had been with the tragic end of his brother. Not so his. He had no sentiment for Abel even now; no pity for the fate which had overtaken him. The best he could find to say about him was that he had paid the penalty and called quits, and left the better man to come into his own. Not for himself--that was the moral reservation, after all, which silenced and confounded us. He longed for the treasure; he gloated in the thought of its resurrection; but now for my sake, not his own. With the prospect of its recovery instant in his mind, he never wavered in his intention to bestow it all on the son of the man who had died to vindicate his honesty. I could have laughed again over this tragic, comical, chimerical bequest to me; only tears were too near the source of humour. It was terrible, and indecent, and pathetic in one. _We_ sought life for no end but sweet life’s own. The rest was a mockery. Well, he kept us alive with it, that I believe. Even after he himself was numbed and silenced from stimulating us, from encouraging us by sympathy and example to prevail through hope, he would keep nodding brightly to us to rally our spirits, until his neck got too stiff to nod at all. It must have been half-past six and near the time of ebb, when the spectral dark which engulphed us knew a change. The fog, lying low on the water, grew slowly diaphanous, waxing from a weak dawn, like heaven seen through dying lids, to a sweet and solemn lightness. For long we were too exhausted, body and mind, to consider what this portended. The lightness increased; and suddenly high over the bank shone a little red spark like a lantern. We lifted our dazed heads; we stirred stiffly where we sat. O God! O God! what did it mean? Swiftly it broadened, glowing like a rising fire. It mounted, or the haze shrunk beneath it--who could tell? In a moment it was free, and we knew it, in wonder and thankfulness, for the moon.