ve been
impelled towards it by discovering the injustice and cruelty of his
own unforgiveness towards his young wife at some previous time--as,
for instance, in America--when she herself was beyond his reach, and
a recantation of his error impossible. Unless we accept his conduct
as the result of a momentary dementia, produced by overstrain, it
must remain inexplicable.

It appeared to him, so far as he was afterwards able to define or
record it, that he was no longer walking on the familiar track between
the few lodging-houses that made up the old St. Sennans, and the still
older fishing-quarter near the jetty, but that he was again on his way
from Lahore to Kurachi, from which he was to embark for a new land
where his broken heart might do its best to heal; for if ever a man
was utterly broken-hearted it was he when he came away from Lahore,
after his futile attempt to procure a divorce. He no longer saw the
cold northern sea under its great blue cloud-curtain that had shrouded
the coming day; nor the line of fishing-smacks, beached high and dry,
and their owners' dwellings near at hand, a little town of tar and
timber in behind the stowage-huts of nets and tackle, nor the white
escarpment of the cliffs beyond, that the sea had worked so many
centuries to plunder from the rounded pastures of the sheep above. He
no longer heard the music of the waves on the shingle, nor the cry of
the sea-bird that swept over them, nor the tinkle of the sheep-bell
the wind knows how to carry so far in the stillness of the morning,
nor the voices of the fisher-children playing in the boats that one
day may bear them to their death. His mind was far away in the Indian
heat, parching and suffocated on the long railway journey from Lahore
to Kurachi, scarcely better when he had reached his first boat that
was to take him to Bombay, to embark again a day or two later for
Australia. How little he had forgotten of the short but tedious delay
in that chaotic emporium of all things European and Asiatic, that
many-coloured meeting-ground of a thousand nationalities! How little,
that the whole should come back to him now, and fill his brain with
its reality, till the living present grew dim and vanished; reviving
now and again, as fiction, read in early years, revives with a
suggested doubt--is it true or false?

He sat again on the Esplanade at Bombay, as the sun vanished in a
flood of rosy gold, and released the world from his heat. He felt