De Courval gaily related the tale to his mother and then went away with
her to her room, she exclaiming on the stair: "The woman has good
manners. She understood me."

The woman and Pearl were meanwhile laughing joyously over the sad lady's
criticism. When once in her bed-room, the vicomtesse said that on the
morrow she would rest in bed. Something, perhaps the voyage and all this
new life, had been too much for her, and she had a little fever. A
tisane, yes, if only she had a tisane, but who would know how to make
one? No, he must tell no one that she was not well.

He left her feeling that here was a new trouble and went down-stairs to
join Schmidt. No doubt she was really tired, but what if it were
something worse? One disaster after another had left him with the belief
that he was marked out by fate for calamitous fortunes.

Schmidt cheered him with his constant hopefulness, and in the morning he
must not fail Mr. Wynne, and at need Schmidt would get a doctor. Then he
interested him with able talk about the stormy politics of the day, and
for a time they smoked in silence. At last, observing his continued
depression, Schmidt said: "Take this to bed with you--At night is
despair, at morning hope--a good word to sleep on. Let the morrow take
care of itself. Bury thy cares in the graveyard of sleep." Then he added
with seriousness rare to him: "You have the lesson of the mid-years of
life yet to learn--to be of all thought the despot. Never is man his own
master till, like the centurion with his soldiers, he can say to joy
come and to grief or anger or anxiety go, and be obeyed of these. You
may think it singular that I, a three-days' acquaintance, talk thus to a
stranger; but the debt is all one way so far, and my excuse is those
five years under water, and, too, that this preacher in his time has
suffered."

Unused till of late to sympathy, and surprised out of the reserve both
of the habit of caste and of his own natural reticence, De Courval felt
again the emotion of a man made, despite himself, to feel how the
influence of honest kindness had ended his power to speak.

In the dim candle-light he looked at the speaker--tall, grave, the eagle
nose, the large mouth, the heavy chin, a face of command, with now a
little watching softness in the eyes.

He felt later the goodness and the wisdom of the German's advice. "I
will try," he said; "but it does seem as if there were little but
trouble in the world," and