ecy. Word by word, the story had been
wrested from him. In the cold and comfortless hour of death, the
strong, worldly man felt his physical weakness loosen the iron bands
of his will, and he became for a time almost like a child in the hands
of the keen, swiftly-questioning priest. He had not found much comfort
in the mumbled prayers and absolution, which were all he got in
exchange for his life's secret,--and such a secret! He had not,
indeed, noticed the fixed, far-away gaze in the priest's dark eyes as
he knelt by the bedside; but his prayers, his faint words of comfort,
had fallen like drops of ice upon his quickened desire to be brought
a little nearer to that mysterious, shadowy essence of goodness which
was all his mind could conceive of a God. It had seemed like a dead
form of words, lifeless, hopeless, monotonous; and all that faint
striving to attain to some knowledge of the truth--if indeed truth
there was--had been crushed into ashes by it. As he had lived, so must
he die, he told himself with some return of that philosophic quietude
which had led him, stout-hearted and brave, through many dangers. And,
at that moment when he had been striving to detach his thoughts from
their vain task of conjuring up useless regrets, there had come what
even now seemed to be the granting of his last passionate prayer. The
man whom he had longed to see once more before his eyes were closed
forever upon the world, with such a longing that his heart had grown
sick and weary with the burden of it, had been brought as though by a
miracle almost to his side. He knew as though by some strange instinct
the measure of his strength. He had no fear of dying before his
heart's dearest wish could be gratified. If only that fiercely
labouring vessel succeeded in her brave struggle, he knew that there
would be strength left to him to bear the shock of meeting, to bear
even the shock of the tidings which could either sweeten his last few
moments, or deepen the gloom of his passage into the unknown world.
And so he lay there, with fixed, glazed eyes and shortened breath,
watching and waiting.

The supreme moment came; the steamer had reached the dangerous point,
and the waves were breaking over her with such fury that more than
once she vanished altogether from sight, only to reappear in a moment
or two, quivering and trembling from stern to hull like a living
creature. After all, the struggle was a brief one, though it seemed
long to th