ife lay before him
radiant and resplendent. No avenue in Paris, or in any part of the world,
blazing with the lights of some grand festival, ever shone with such
glowing splendor as the future life of Captain Horn now shone and
sparkled before him, as he walked and walked, on and on, and crossed the
river into the Latin Quarter, before he perceived that his hotel was a
mile or more behind him.

From the moment that the _Arato_ had left the Straits of Magellan, and
Captain Horn had had reason to believe that he had left his dangers
behind him, the prow of his vessel had been set toward the Strait of
Gibraltar, and every thought of his heart toward Edna. Burke and Shirley
both noticed a change in him. After he left the Rackbirds' cove, until he
had sailed into the South Atlantic, his manner had been quiet, alert,
generally anxious, and sometimes stern. But now, day by day, he appeared
to be growing into a different man. He was not nervous, nor apparently
impatient, but it was easy to see that within him there burned a steady
purpose to get on as fast as the wind would blow them northward.

Day by day, as he walked the deck of his little vessel, one might have
thought him undergoing a transformation from the skipper of a schooner
into the master of a great ship, into the captain of a swift Atlantic
liner, into the commander of a man-of-war, into the commodore on board a
line-of-battle ship. It was not an air of pride or assumed superiority
that he wore, it was nothing assumed, it was nothing of which he was not
entirely aware. It was the gradual growth within him, as health grows
into a man recovering from a sickness, of the consciousness of power.
The source of that consciousness lay beneath him, as he trod the deck of
the _Arato_.

This consciousness, involuntary, and impossible to resist, had nothing
definite about it. It had nothing which could wholly satisfy the soul of
this man, who kept his eyes and his thoughts so steadfastly toward the
north. He knew that there were but few things in the world that his power
could not give him, but there was one thing upon which it might have no
influence whatever, and that one thing was far more to him than all other
things in this world.

Sometimes, as he sat smoking beneath the stars, he tried to picture to
himself the person who might be waiting and watching for him in Paris,
and to try to look upon her as she must really be; for, after her life in
San Francisco and Paris,