io!"

"It is grand. And the gulf between! But we haven't any in our part. It's
all level. Do you believe the tenth wave is larger than the rest?"

"Why, the difficulty is to know which the tenth wave is, or when to
begin counting."

"Yes," said the girl, and she added, vaguely: "I suppose it's like
everything else in that. We have to make-believe before we can believe
anything."

"Something like an hypothesis certainly seems necessary," Breckon
assented, with a smile for the gravity of their discourse. "We shouldn't
have the atomic theory without it." She did not say anything, and he
decided that the atomic theory was beyond the range of her reading. He
tried to be more concrete. "We have to make-believe in ourselves before
we can believe, don't we? And then we sometimes find we are wrong!" He
laughed, but she asked, with tragical seriousness:

"And what ought you to do when you find out you are mistaken in
yourself?"

"That's what I'm trying to decide," he replied. "Sometimes I feel like
renouncing myself altogether; but usually I give myself another chance.
I dare say if I hadn't been so forbearing I might have agreed with your
sister about my unfitness for the ministry."

"With Lottie?"

"She thinks I laugh too much!"

"I don't see why a minister shouldn't laugh if he feels like it. And if
there's something to laugh at."

"Ah, that's just the point! Is there ever anything to laugh at? If we
looked closely enough at things, oughtn't we rather to cry?" He laughed
in retreat from the serious proposition. "But it wouldn't do to try
making each other cry instead of laugh, would it? I suppose your sister
would rather have me cry."

"I don't believe Lottie thought much about it," said Ellen; and at this
point Mr. Breckon yielded to an impulse.

"I should think I had really been of some use if I had made you laugh,
Miss Kenton."

"Me?"

"You look as if you laughed with your whole heart when you did laugh."

She glanced about, and Breckon decided that she had found him too
personal. "I wonder if I could walk, with the ship tipping so?" she
asked.

"Well, not far," said Breckon, with a provisional smile, and then he was
frightened from his irony by her flinging aside her wraps and starting
to her feet. Before he could scramble to his own, she had slid down
the reeling promenade half to the guard, over which she seemed about to
plunge. He hurled himself after her; he could not have done otherwise;
and it