rain the wind dropped
a little.

But he was becoming tired out and he knew it. Soon he would no longer be
able to keep the canoe straight, and then they must be swamped, and in
all human probability drowned. So this was to be the end of his life
and its ambitions. Before another hour had run its course, he would be
rolling to and fro in the arms of that angry sea. What would his wife
Honoria say when she heard the news, he wondered? Perhaps it would shock
her into some show of feeling. And Effie, his dear little six-year-old
daughter? Well, thank God, she was too young to feel his loss for long.
By the time that she was a woman she would almost have forgotten that
she ever had a father. But how would she get on without him to guide
her? Her mother did not love children, and a growing girl would
continually remind her of her growing years. He could not tell; he could
only hope for the best.

And for himself! What would become of him after the short sharp struggle
for life? Should he find endless sleep, or what? He was a Christian, and
his life had not been worse than that of other men. Indeed, though he
would have been the last to think it, he had some redeeming virtues. But
now at the end the spiritual horizon was as dark as it had been at the
beginning. There before him were the Gates of Death, but not yet would
they roll aside and show the traveller what lay beyond their frowning
face. How could he tell? Perhaps they would not open at all. Perhaps he
now bade his last farewell to consciousness, to earth and sky and sea
and love and all lovely things. Well, that might be better than some
prospects. At that moment Geoffrey Bingham, in the last agony of doubt,
would gladly have exchanged his hopes of life beyond for a certainty of
eternal sleep. That faith which enables some of us to tread this awful
way with an utter confidence is not a wide prerogative, and, as yet,
at any rate, it was not his, though the time might come when he would
attain it. There are not very many, even among those without reproach,
who can lay them down in the arms of Death, knowing most certainly that
when the veil is rent away the countenance that they shall see will
be that of the blessed Guardian of Mankind. Alas! he could not be
altogether sure, and where doubt exists, hope is but a pin-pricked
bladder. He sighed heavily, murmured a little formula of prayer that had
been on his lips most nights during thirty years--he had learnt it as
a c