en head this time, and
presently lost his way also in the dark and murk of the storm.

At eight o'clock she struck. She was thrown on her side, a heavy sea
broke over her, and they were all washed off. No one raised a cry. They
were busy fighting Death.

Gaston was a strong swimmer. It did not occur to him that perhaps this
was the easiest way out of the maze. He had ever been a fighter.
The seas tossed him here and there. He saw faces about him for an
instant--shaggy wild Breton faces--but they dropped away, he knew not
where. The current kept driving him inshore. As in a dream, he could
hear the breakers--the pumas on their tread-mill of death. How
long would it last? How long before he would be beaten upon that
tread-mill--fondled to death by those mad paws? Presently dreams
came-kind, vague, distant dreams. His brain flew like a drunken dove to
far points of the world and back again. A moment it rested. Andree! He
had made no provision for her, none at all. He must live, he must fight
on for her, the homeless girl, his wife.

He fought on and on. No longer in the water, as it seemed to him. He had
travelled very far. He heard the clash of sabres, the distant roar of
cannon, the beating of horses' hoofs--the thud-thud, tread-tread of
an army. How reckless and wild it was! He stretched up his arm to
strike-what was it? Something hard that bruised: then his whole body was
dashed against the thing. He was back again, awake. With a last effort
he drew himself up on a huge rock that stands lonely in the wash of the
bay. Then he cried out, "Andree!" and fell senseless--safe.

The storm went down. The cold, fast-travelling moon came out, saw the
one living thing in that wild bay, and hurried on into the dark again;
but came and went so till morning, playing hide-and-seek with the man
and his Ararat.

Daylight saw him, wet, haggard, broken, looking out over the waste of
shaken water. Upon the shore glared the stone of the vanished City of
Ys in the warm sun, and the fierce pumas trod their grumbling way.
Sea-gulls flew about the quiet set figure, in whose brooding eyes there
were at once despair and salvation.

He was standing between two worlds. He had had his great crisis, and his
wounded soul rested for a moment ere he ventured out upon the highways
again. He knew not how it was, but there had passed into him the dignity
of sorrow and the joy of deliverance at the same time. He saw life's
responsibilities clearer,