‘Here, Clerivault.’ ‘Lower--I had much to say--but there is only a moment--left. I must use it--to confess.’ ‘What, dear?’ ‘Is it only you that hears? I have--lied to you.’ ‘How?’ ‘I am not really--of English blood--I have not a drop of it--in my veins.’ ‘Dear Clerivault; I knew. What then?’ ‘You knew? And yet--would let me speak--for England--claim--to represent her?’ ‘O, Clerivault, Clerivault! Whatever your blood, you have an English heart. You have loved England and died for her. Now are you for ever more one of her dearest sons.’ A radiance came into the fading eyes; the dying man rose with a sudden powerful effort from his pillow. ‘England!’ he cried hoarsely. A rush of blood rumbled from his mouth, and he fell back dead. * * * * * * They dropped him the next day into the blue sea, with a shot at his feet. Brion looked on with tearless eyes and a numbed brain. It was all right, he supposed, and they could do nothing else; but he wished they had lashed them together first, and ended the whole business then and there. He had a curious feeling of being half-dead himself, as if a moiety of his vitality had been withdrawn with that dear inseparable comrade. How could he ever care for life again without Clerivault? His love, and now his friend? Surely Destiny had dealt with him unduly at so early an age. He was sad and alone--no longer with any definite object in the world. So he thought in his unhappiness, poor soul. He had gone forth so radiantly, and only, after all, to find Desolation. With that he was returning to face the desolate house, his home; with that to vindicate his desertion of a trust and duty. His dead comrade’s words returned upon him with a pitiful force which shook his heart. Ought he to have allowed himself to be tempted away? A fever was upon him all at once to be back in England--in Devonshire; a mad longing to cancel the intervening space which lay between him and surety. So, in his loneliness and despair, there returned to him, and with a wonderful new sense of restfulness, a thought which had already half troubled, half bewitched his mind. He knew in what soft and gentle bosom he could find, if he would, the welcome and the comradeship his soul so longed for. Why not abandon the struggle, yield for once and for all his scruples, and so turn the tables on the fate which had thought finally to bereave him? The very reflection was balm out of sickness. It steadied the agitation of his nerves and induced in him a feeling of tranquil resignation. Thenceforth the turmoil in his mind subsided, and he set himself to face with sober philosophy the weary days of the voyage which yet lay before him. He was no longer in any hurry to reach home; which testified to the rationality of his resolve, if it did not to any compelling force of passion behind it.