He rose presently and strolled away from the group on the deck, smoking his cigar and scanning the weather signs of the coming evening. The stress of the subject of Randal Ducie’s bereavement weighed heavily on his nerves in this vicinity. If, under all the circumstances, it could be so easily and openly mentioned here he was not sure of his ability to listen with discretion. The world was growing strange to him,--he felt himself indeed a survival. He did not understand such views as seemed to possess this woman, such standards of right, such induration of sensibilities. Man and soldier though he was, he could look only with glooming and averse eyes at the wreck of the _Cherokee Rose_, where a dread deed was wrought, lying white and stark, skeleton-wise, like bleaching bones on the sand-bar in that immaterial region between the pallid mists of the evening and the gray sheen of the river. Very melancholy the aspect of the forlorn craft, he thought in passing, and he scarcely wondered at the prevalence of the riverside legend that strange presences were wont to revisit the glimpses of the moon on this grim, storied wreck of the Mississippi. He could not imagine how Mrs. Floyd-Rosney in pursuit of pleasure could endure to pass this poignantly ghastly reminder, and still further down the stream to approach the site of Duciehurst under its swirling depths,--the packets now made a landing called by the name a mile to the rearward of the spot where the old mansion had stood. But presently the graceful yacht was steaming swiftly down this glamourous reach of the river, and beneath its gliding shadow in inconceivable depths lay this epitome of the past,--the demolished home altar, with its spent incense of domestic affection, the lost hopes, with their lure of tenuous illusions; the futile turmoils of grief; the transient elation of joy; the final climax of death,--all the constituent elements of human experience. Now they were naught, nullified, while the world swept on uncaring, typified by the swift yacht, leaving astern the site of oblivion. * * * * * +-------------------------------------------------------+ |The following pages contain advertisements of Macmillan| | books by the same author, and new fiction. | +-------------------------------------------------------+ * * * * * BOOKS BY CHARLES EGBERT CRADDOCK (MISS MARY MURFREE) The Storm Center _Cloth, 12mo. $1.50 net._