e
stone, his ears resting on his fists, his back turned to the whole
world, his eye fixed on the old massive iron ring fastened in the wall
of the house, at only a few feet from his window, where in the old days
he used to moor the Durande. He was looking at the rust which gathered
on the ring.

He was reduced to the mere mechanical habit of living.

The bravest men, when deprived of their most cherished idea, will come
to this. His life had become a void. Life is a voyage; the idea is the
itinerary. The plan of their course gone, they stop. The object is lost,
the strength of purpose gone. Fate has a secret discretionary power. It
is able to touch with its rod even our moral being. Despair is almost
the destitution of the soul. Only the greatest minds resist, and for
what?

Mess Lethierry was always meditating, if absorption can be called
meditation, in the depth of a sort of cloudy abyss. Broken words
sometimes escaped him like these, "There is nothing left for me now, but
to ask yonder for leave to go."

There was a certain contradiction in that nature, complex as the sea, of
which Mess Lethierry was, so to speak, the product. Mess Lethierry's
grief did not seek relief in prayer.

To be powerless is a certain strength. In the presence of our two great
expressions of this blindness--destiny and nature--it is in his
powerlessness that man has found his chief support in prayer.

Man seeks succour from his terror; his anxiety bids him kneel. Prayer,
that mighty force of the soul, akin to mystery. Prayer addresses itself
to the magnanimity of the Shades; prayer regards mystery with eyes
themselves overshadowed by it, and beneath the power of its fixed and
appealing gaze, we feel the possibility of the great Unknown unbending
to reply.

The mere thought of such a possibility becomes a consolation.

But Mess Lethierry prayed not.

In the time when he was happy, God existed for him almost in visible
contact. Lethierry addressed Him, pledged his word to Him, seemed at
times to hold familiar intercourse with Him. But in the hour of his
misfortune, a phenomenon not infrequent--the idea of God had become
eclipsed in his mind. This happens when the mind has created for itself
a deity clothed with human qualities.

In the state of mind in which he existed, there was for Lethierry only
one clear vision--the smile of Deruchette. Beyond this all was dark.

For some time, apparently on account of the loss of the Durande,