Nichols struck the table sharply with his fist. "Beware of too much happiness!" he growled "That’s another lesson of a jaundiced civilization. It isn’t expedient to embrace truth too hard.... Who could have conceived an existence safer than Devereux’s, or one more likely to last? The broadest ocean in the world guarded him; the place of his retreat had never been discovered. The people adored him, the arms of a great love enfolded him; and he was glad to stay. What better ramparts could life have built for his defence? But fate, the old destroyer, willed it otherwise; and he was sent back to us, to an unbelieving world—to point some obscure moral, I suppose, perhaps in an attempt to show up all the hollowness and unreality ... if we only had the eyes to see. "They had saved the whaleboat, of course; Devereux used to cruise about the island in her, catching wonderful fish, for he was a sailor at heart, and couldn’t keep off the water. One day something led him far off shore—a speck on the horizon, which he’d no sooner seen than he wished to investigate. It looked like a piece of wreckage, or a boat; he became suddenly excited to think of finding traces of his fellow-men. Thus the devil with a memory lured him to destruction. The object was farther away than he had at first realized; it continued for a long while to look like a boat with a man’s figure propped up in one end. But when he finally came up to it, he found nothing more interesting than a tree floating half submerged with a huge root that indeed resembled, even at close range, the fancy his mind had created. "About this time it fell flat calm; he noticed a heavy squall gathering on the eastern horizon. He took down the sail and started to row with two short oars which he carried for an emergency. But four or five miles lay between him and the island; before he’d covered a third of the distance, the squall met him head on. "It was one of those savage arch-squalls that occur on the fringe of the trade winds once or twice in the course of a year. The island lay to windward of him; he didn’t set the sail, of course, for he would have been unable to do anything but run before it. In fact, there was nothing left but to try to keep her head in the wind with the two short oars. The squall became more violent; a short choppy sea sprang up as if by magic, and spray flew from the wave-tops in blinding sheets. At last he had to give it up. He managed to save the oars; with one of them in his hand he scrambled aft. The boat sped around like a chip as his weight settled in the stern. Then she gathered headway, and he began to steer, running away from the island. Darkness was falling; he couldn’t see how fast he was dropping the land. But his sailor’s instinct told him all about it. As night closed in, he realized the worst; he and the whaleboat were being blown to sea.