as Sargeant? how else was
he slowly loosening the grip of the one evil and vicious habit that had
clutched him so long? how else was his ambition stirring? how else was
his hitherto aimless enthusiasm hardening to energy and determination?
She had not always so influenced him. In the days when they had just
known each other, and met each other in the weekly course of their
formal life, it had not been so, even though they pretended a certain
amount of affection. He remembered the evening when Blix had brought
those days to an abrupt end, and how at the moment he had told himself
that after all he had never known the real Blix. Since then, in the
charming, unconventional life they had led, everything had been
changed. He had come to know her for what she was, to know her genuine
goodness, her sincerity, her contempt of affectations, her comradeship,
her calm, fine strength and unbroken good nature; and day by day, here
a little and there a little, his love for her had grown so quietly, so
evenly, that he had never known it, until now, behold! it was suddenly
come to flower, full and strong--a flower whose fragrance had suddenly
filled all his life and all his world with its sweetness.

Half an hour after leaving the lifeboat station, Condy and Blix reached
the old, red-brick fort, deserted, abandoned, and rime-incrusted, at
the entrance of the Golden Gate. They turned its angle, and there
rolled the Pacific, a blue floor of shifting water, stretching out
there forever and forever over the curve of the earth, over the
shoulder of the world, with never a sail in view and never a break from
horizon to horizon.

They followed down the shore, sometimes upon the old and broken flume
that runs along the seaward face of the hills that rise from the beach,
or sometimes upon the beach itself, stepping from bowlder to bowlder,
or holding along at the edge of the water upon reaches of white, hard
sand.

The beach was solitary; not a soul was in sight. Close at hand, to
landward, great hills, bare and green, shut off the sky; and here and
there the land came tumbling down into the sea in great, jagged, craggy
rocks, knee-deep in swirling foam, and all black with wet. The air was
full of the prolonged thunder of the surf, and at intervals sea-birds
passed overhead with an occasional piping cry. Wreckage was tumbled
about here and there; and innumerable cocoanut shards, huge, brown cups
of fuzzy bark, lay underfoot and in