othing remained of it but remembrance, such remembrance as we retain for
dead things, a remembrance without hope, whose weight added to the
homesickness which with him was increasing every day.

There was no active service to enable him to endure exile. The heroic
period of the war had passed. Since a treaty of peace had been signed
with China, the fleet, which had distinguished itself in so many small
engagements and bombardments, had had nothing to do but to mount guard,
as it were, along a conquered coast. All round it in the bay, where it
lay at anchor, rose mountains of strange shapes, which seemed to shut it
into a kind of prison. This feeling of nothing to be done--of nothing
likely to be done, worked in Fred's head like a nightmare. The only thing
he thought of was how he could escape, when could he once more kiss the
faded cheeks of his mother, who often, when he slept or lay wakeful
during the long hours of the siesta, he saw beside him in tears. Hers was
the only face that he recalled distinctly; to her and to her only were
devoted his long reveries when on watch; that time when he formerly
composed his love verses, tender or angry, or full of despair. That was
all over! A sort of mournful resignation had succeeded his bursts of
excited feeling, his revolt against his fate.

This was Fred's state of mind when he received orders to return
home--orders as unexpected as everything seems to be in the life of a
naval man. "I am going back to her!" he cried. Her was his mother, her
was France. All the rest had disappeared as if into a fog. Jacqueline was
a phantom of the past; so many things had happened since the old times
when he had loved her. He had crossed the Indian Ocean and the China Sea;
he had seen long stretches of interminable coast-line; he had beheld
misery, and glory, and all the painful scenes that wait on warfare; he
had seen pestilence, and death in every shape, and all this had wrought
in him a sort of stoicism, the result of long acquaintance with solitude
and danger. He remembered his old love as a flower he had once admired as
he passed it, a treacherous flower, with thorns that had wounded him.
There are flowers that are beneficent, and flowers that are poisonous,
and the last are sometimes the most beautiful. They should not be blamed,
he thought; it was their nature to be hurtful; but it was well to pass
them by and not to gather them.

By the time he had debarked Fred had made up his mind