g towards the Point of Ayre, and when they
came by the light Stephen Orry slackened off, and watched the ship go
by him in the darkness.

He felt as if that were the last he was ever to see of his son in
this world. And he loved him with all the strength of his great
broken, bleeding heart. At that thought the outcast man laid his head
in his hands, where he sat crouching at the tiller, and sobbed. There
were none to hear him there; he was alone; and the low moan of the
sea came up through the night from where his son was sailing away.

How long he sat there he did not know; he was thinking of his past,
of his bad life in Iceland, and his long expiation in the Isle of
Man. In the multitude of his sensations it seemed impossible to his
dazed mind to know which of these two had been the worst, or the most
foolish. Together they had left him a wreck. In the one he had thrown
away the wife who loved him, in the other he had given up the son
whom he loved. What was left to him? Nothing. He was a waif, despised
and downtrodden. He thought of what might have happened to him if the
chances of life had been different, and in that first hour of his
last bereavement all the softening influences of nineteen years, the
uplooking and upworking, and the struggle towards atonement, were as
much gone from him as if they had never been. Then he thought of the
money, and told himself that it was not now that he lost his son for
the first time; he had lost him fourteen years ago, when he parted
with him to the Governor. Since then their relations had been
reversed. His little Sunlocks was his little Sunlocks no longer. He
felt humiliated, he felt hardened, and by a strange impulse, whereof
he understood but little, he cursed in his heart his sufferings more
than his sins. They had been useless, they had been wasted, and he
had been a fool not to live for himself. But in that moment, when the
devil seemed to make havoc of good and evil together, God himself was
not doing nothing.

Stephen Orry was drifting with the tide, when all at once he became
conscious of the lapping of the water on stones near at hand, and of
a bright light shed over the sea. Then he saw that he had drifted
close to low ground off the Point of Ayre. He bore hard aport and
beat out to sea again. Very soon the white water way was behind him;
nothing was visible save the dark hull of the vessel going off
towards the north, and nothing audible save the cry of a few gul