chilly grey colour. The water was smooth and dark beneath
the hills, but nearer the ship it was touched by the clear pale light of
the rising sun. The hills rose jagged and sharp against the sky without
a scrap of verdure on them; but the kindly atmosphere turned those in the
distance to a soft and tender blue. It smoothed away the rugged lines
and effaced the cruel-looking scars that seamed their sides, and covered
them with a misty peace. It seemed to the young man as he looked at them
that things became easier when viewed from a distance. He had suffered
very deeply during the last few weeks, and with him had suffered the girl
whom he had loved and cared for always, and whom he would love and care
for until the end of his life. Looking back at the distant misty hills
on Cape Verde Island this voyage seemed to him, in spite of all its
horrible sense of separation, to be something of a lull in the midst of
quick-happening events. When first he left home he had been plagued with
thoughts which he had fought with almost savage fierceness, and he had
wrestled to expel them from his mind; but that there could be any mystery
in his mother's life had necessarily awakened endless questionings in his
mind.

Why, if this little brother of his had not died, had he disappeared? And
what was the reason for his disappearance? 'He did not die,' said the
half-finished letter which his mother's hand had traced; 'he did not
die.' Once, in the middle of the night, as he said the wearisome
sentence over to himself, a word had come suddenly before him in letters
of flame, and Peter had turned away from it with a cry. A child who had
been deprived of his life might be said in a sense not to have died, and
there was the word of six letters in front of him in the dark. He turned
on the electric light in his cabin, and for a moment he had half a mind
to go in next door and wake Toffy. The burden of the suggestion was too
horrible to bear alone. 'He did not die!' His mother's mental state
might not have been perfectly sound at the time of her husband's death;
and her preference for him, Peter, was a fact that had been remarked by
all who knew her. Had she begun to write a confession to her son, and
stopped short in the middle? 'Don't hate me too much,' the letter said.
Why should he hate her? He did not know.

In the morning he was able to put aside utterly the thought which had
tormented him, but he lived in dread of being b