as beyond its
guarding dragon, lay the whole mysterious and peaceful empire, with
uncounted lives going on, ending, beginning, as though he, and his sore
loss, and his heart vacant of all but grief, belonged to some
unheard-of, alien process, to Nature's most unworthy trifling. This
boatload of men and women--so huge a part of his own experience--was
like the tiniest barnacle chafed from the side of that dark,
serene monster.

Rudolph stared long at the hills, and as they faded, hung his head.
From that dragon he had learned much; yet now all learning was but loss.

Of a sudden the girl spoke, in a clear yet guarded voice, too low to
reach the sleepers.

"What are you thinking of?" she said. "Come tell me. It will be good for
both of us."

Rudolph crossed silently, and stood leaning on the gunwale beside her.

"I thought only," he answered, "how much the hills looked so--as a
dragon."

"How strange." The trembling phosphorus half-revealed her face, pale and
still. "I was thinking of that, in a way. It reminded me of what he
said, once--when we were walking together."

To their great relief, they found themselves talking of Heywood, sadly,
but freely, and as it were in a sudden calm. Their friendship seemed,
for the moment, a thing as long established as the dragon hills. Years
afterward, Rudolph recalled her words, plainer than the fiery wonder
that spread and burst round their little vessel, or the long play of
heat-lightning which now, from time to time, wavered instantly along the
eastern sea-line.

"You are right," she declared once. "To go on with life, even when we
are alone--You will go on, I know. Bravely." And again she said: "Yes,
such men as he are--a sort of Happy Warrior." And later, in her slow and
level voice: "You learned something, you say. Isn't that--what I
call--being invulnerable? When a man's greater than anything that
happens to him--"

So they talked, their speech bare and simple, but the pauses and longer
silences filled with deep understanding, solemnized by the time and the
place, as though their two lonely spirits caught wisdom from the night,
scope from the silent ocean, light from the flickering East.

The flashes, meanwhile, came faster and prolonged their glory, running
behind a thin, dead screen of scalloped clouds, piercing the tropic sky
with summer blue, and ripping out the lost horizon like a long black
fibre from pulp. The two friends watched in silence, when Rudolph r