The Southampton steamer approached St. Malo about three o'clock on the following afternoon. Robert and Brigit had spent the night on deck--it was better than going below into the close, dreary cabin--and so they counted the stars, and kept their gaze, through the vast reaches of atmosphere, for the first sight of land. The moon, then at its full strength, lit up the whole blue dome above them, and cast its glancing, silver path upon the water--a path which the ship ever crossed but never followed. On and on they sped, and, as their ears grew accustomed to the monotonous churning of the paddle-wheels, the silence seemed intense. The splendour of the night made sleep, to minds as passionate as theirs toward all manifestations of the world's beauty, impossible. Unconscious of any particular thought, they shared a dreamless reverie which was so perfect in its rest and so complete in its still contentment that they did not know that they were resting, nor could they realise that such sweet hours, even as bitter ones, do not loiter in their passing or come again. Soon enough Robert saw himself very far gone from the undissembled sternness of his old resolutions. If he could but be rid of that altogether! He thought he had obtained a mystic recognition of the terrorless but uncommunicating Joy of life which while men live they pursue, desiring it with the one human craving which survives every misfortune, every thwarted hope, all enslavement of the heart's small freedom--the thirst for happiness. Was man, whom God had made in His own Image, but a shadow on the unstable wind? Could it be true that he came in with vanity and departed in darkness, his soul bereft of God, knowing not his time, finding not the work that is done under the sun, born to companion worms in the dust? Should he remain unresisting and without influence on the decision of his own destiny? Yet he remembered the precept of Christ: "Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it"--words which put forth a great mystery, perhaps a warning. Plainly, in all that a man could bring to the world, or take from it, there was vanity and death; but many things were vain merely because they were not eternal, and many things perished because where life is, change must be. Immutable, permanent possessions were the gifts of God to men. But the gifts of men to God would always be imperfect--whether they offered the sacrifice of their wills or their imagined earthly happiness. Yet if this imperfection were a mean one, something less grand than the immeasurable sanctity of Divine strength made human and therefore sorrowful, therefore not omnipotent, therefore liable to error--where then was the merit of renouncing a manhood already too squalid to be endured, friends that were phantoms, loves that were lies, joys that were void promises invented by the cruel for the disappointment of the foolish? He looked