, we beseech, we beseech: Lord God for my unbaptized! Dear
Christ for Christian's Diadyomene! Blessed Trinity and all Saints for a
nameless soul in sore need!'

CHAPTER XVI

Through all creation went the divine breath of renunciation. Joy for the
birth of Christ rang on; and motionless, wordless, Diadyomene hearkened,
released from the magic of the sea.

Dawned a vision remote, but strangely distinct, of a small life
comprehending two dear figures--one most dear; and thereto a small,
beautiful pain responded. A tale flashed across and across, gaining
coherence, giving it: the tale of a loved and lost child, long years ago
lost to the sea; loved still. Perfect grew the interweaving; the
substance of the two became one.

Joy for the birth of Christ was abroad, thrilling all planes of existence
with the divine breath of renunciation. In the soul of Diadyomene, waked
from its long trance, love was alive; a finite, individual love, chief
centred on one dearest to remembrance. The beautiful pain grew large, and
the cold heart that the sea-life had filled and satisfied was yearning
for share in another life long forgone. A small divine instinct,
following ignorantly in the wake of that great celestial love that
hundreds of years ago stooped to the sorrow of life, urged her to
renounce the ample strengths and joys of the sea, and to satisfy a
piteous want, were it by repression of energies, by eschewing full
flavours of sense, by the draining of her young life. The soul of true
womanhood in this child for the cherishing of her mother's waxed mature.

Motionless, wordless, she hearkened while separate bells cadenced; when
again they fell to their wonted unison, the sea-bred woman knew that a
soul was hers, and that it claimed dominion.

'We beseech, we beseech, we beseech: Lord God for my unbaptized! Dear
Christ for Christian's Diadyomene! Blessed Trinity and all Saints for a
nameless soul in sore need!'

Diadyomene flung out vacant arms, and moaned a dear name, for years
unuttered. Across the long interval of sea-life her spirit leaned to own
the filial heart of childhood. Clear to her as yesterday came back that
broken fragment of earlier life,--bright, partial, inadequate, quaintly
minute, as impression had gone into a happy, foolish infant. Not a
memory had traversed the ground since to blur a detail, though now the
adult faculties could apprehend distortion, the beautiful vagarious
distortion that can live i