happy, happy lovers! how gloriously that night did the stars shine out
for you in the deep, unfathomable galaxies of heaven, and the dew fall,
and the moon dawn into a sky yet flushed with the long-unfading purple
of the fading day! Yet there was sadness mixed with their happiness as
they heard, until they parted, the plaintive murmurs of Kennedy's fitful
sleep, and thought of all the sufferings of their brother, and how
nearly, how very nearly, he had been hurried from the midst of them by
self-inflicted death.

CHAPTER THIRTY.

REPENTANCE.

"This world will not believe a man repents,
And this wise world of ours is mainly right
For seldom does a man repent, and use
Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch
Of blood and nature wholly out of him,
And make all clean, and plant himself afresh."
Tennyson's _Idylls_.

Beautiful Orton-on-the-Sea! Who that has been there does not long to
return there again and again, and gaze on the green and purple of its
broad bay, and its one little islet, and the golden sands that stretch
along its winding shore, and its glens clothed with fir trees and
musical with the voice of many rills?

It was there that Kennedy had lived from childhood, and it was there
that he now returned to spend at home the year of his rustication. They
arrived at home on the Monday evening, and from that time forward
Kennedy rapidly gained health and strength, and was able to move about
again, though his hand healed but slowly, and it took months to enable
him to use it without pain.

On that little islet of the bay was Kennedy's favourite haunt. It was a
place where the top of a low cliff was sheltered by a clump of trees
which formed a natural bower, from whence he would gaze untired for
hours on the rising and falling of the tide. A little orphan cousin
whom Mr Kennedy had adopted, used to row him over to this retirement,
and while the boy stayed in their little boat, and fished, or hunted for
seabirds' nests in the undisturbed creeks and inlets, Kennedy with some
volume of the poets in his hand, would rest under the waving branches,
and gaze upon the glancing waves.

And at times, when, like a great glowing globe, the sun sank, after the
fiery heat of some burning summer day, into the crimsoned waters, and
filled the earth, and the heavens, and the sea with silent splendours, a
deep feeling of solemnity, such as he had never before experienced,
would steal over Kennedy