mother, he had found one sweet woman to console him with
her tender words, her loving lips, her delicious caress. She had given
him Zouzoune, the darling link between their lives,--Zouzoune, who
waited each evening with black Eglantine at the gate to watch for his
coming, and to cry through all the house like a bird, "Papa, lape
vini!--papa Zulien ape vini!" ... And once that she had made him very
angry by upsetting the ink over a mass of business papers, and he had
slapped her (could he ever forgive himself?)--she had cried, through
her sobs of astonishment and pain:--"To laimin moin?--to batte moin!"
(Thou lovest me?--thou beatest me!) Next month she would have been five
years old. To laimin moin?--to batte moin! ...

A furious paroxysm of grief convulsed him, suffocated him; it seemed to
him that something within must burst, must break. He flung himself
down upon his bed, biting the coverings in order to stifle his outcry,
to smother the sounds of his despair. What crime had he ever done, oh
God! that he should be made to suffer thus?--was it for this he had
been permitted to live? had been rescued from the sea and carried
round all the world unscathed? Why should he live to remember, to
suffer, to agonize? Was not Ramirez wiser?

How long the contest within him lasted, he never knew; but ere it was
done, he had become, in more ways than one, a changed man. For the
first,--though not indeed for the last time,--something of the deeper
and nobler comprehension of human weakness and of human suffering had
been revealed to him,--something of that larger knowledge without which
the sense of duty can never be fully acquired, nor the understanding of
unselfish goodness, nor the spirit of tenderness. The suicide is not a
coward; he is an egotist.

A ray of sunlight touched his wet pillow,--awoke him. He rushed to the
window, flung the latticed shutters apart, and looked out.

Something beautiful and ghostly filled all the vistas,--frost-haze; and
in some queer way the mist had momentarily caught and held the very
color of the sky. An azure fog! Through it the quaint and checkered
street--as yet but half illumined by the sun,--took tones of impossible
color; the view paled away through faint bluish tints into transparent
purples;--all the shadows were indigo. How sweet the morning!--how
well life seemed worth living! Because the sun had shown his face
through a fairy veil of frost! ...

Who was the ancient think