ugging himself in the salt moisture the fur still retained, to spend
the long hours in half-waking, firelight dreams.

And every burst of tempest rage, every lash of rain at the window,
every thud of hurricane breaking itself on impassable ramparts, and
shriek of baffled winds searching the roofless halls around, found a
strangely glad echo in his brain--made a sort of burden to his
thoughts:

Heap up the waters round this happy island, most welcome winds--heap
them up high and boiling, and retain her long captive in these lonely
ruins!

And ever the image in his mind's eye was, as before, Cecile--Cecile
who had come back to him, for all sober reason knew it was but the
child.

The child----! Why had he never thought of the children these weary
years? They, all that remained of Cecile, were living and might have
been sought. Strange that he had not remembered him of the children!

Twenty years since he had last set eyes upon the little living
creature in her mother's arms. And the picture that the memory evoked
was, after all, Cecile again, only Cecile--not the queer little
black-eyed puppet, even then associated with sea-foam and salty
breeze. Twenty years during which she was growing and waxing in
beauty, and unawares, maturing towards this wonderful meeting--and he
had never given a thought to her existence.

In what sheltered ways had this fair duplicate of his love been
growing from a child to womanhood during that space of life, so long
to look back upon--or so short and transient, according to the mood of
the thinker?

And, lazily, in his happier and tender present mood he tried to
measure once again the cycles of past discontent, this time in terms
of the girl's own lifetime.

It is bitter in misery to recall past misery--almost as bitter, for
all Dante's cry, as to dwell on past happiness. But, be the past
really dead, and a new and better life begun, the scanning back of a
sombre existence done with for ever, may bring with it a kind of
secret complacency.

Truly, mused Sir Adrian, for one who ever cherished ideal aspirations,
for the student, the "man of books" (as his father had been
banteringly wont to term him), worshipper of the muses, intellectual
Epicurean, and would-be optimist philosopher, it must be admitted he
had strangely dealt, and been dealt with, since he first beheld that
face, now returned to light his solitude! Ah, God bless the child!
Pulwick at least nursed it warmly, whilst u