over the submissive waters, the _Sea-horse_ lay a frozen mass, changed
by the might of the winds and the snow and the frost into the grotesque
ice-gaunt phantom of a ship, through which, the winter long, the winds
would go whistling and raving, crowding upon it the snow and the
crystal icicles, all in the wild waste of the desert north, with no ear
to hear the sadness, and no eye to behold the deathly beauty.

At length the hope deferred began to make the heart sick. Dim anxiety
passed into vague fear, and then deepened into dull conviction, over
which ever and anon flickered a pale ghostly hope, like the _fatuus_
over the swamp that has swallowed the unwary wanderer. Each would find
the other wistfully watching to read any thought that might have
escaped the vigilance of its keeper, and come up from the dungeon of
the heart to air itself on the terraces of the face; and each would
drop the glance hurriedly, as if caught in a fault. But the moment came
when their meeting eyes were fixed and they burst into tears, each
accepting the other's confession of hopeless grief as the seal and
doom.

I will not follow them through the slow shadows of gathering fate. I
will not record the fancies that tormented them, or describe the blank
that fell upon the duties of the day. I will not tell how, as the
winter drew on, they heard his voice calling in the storm for help, or
how through the snow-drifts they saw him plodding wearily home. His
mother forgot her debt, and ceased to care what became of herself.
Annie's anxiety settled into an earnest prayer that she might not rebel
against the will of God.

But the anxiety of Thomas Crann was not limited to the earthly fate of
the lad. It extended to his fate in the other world--too probably, in
his eyes, that endless, yearless, undivided fate, wherein the breath
still breathed into the soul of man by his Maker is no longer the
breath of life, but the breath of infinite death--

Sole Positive of Night,
Antipathist of Light,

giving to the ideal darkness a real and individual hypostasis in
helpless humanity, keeping men alive that the light in them may
continue to be darkness.

Terrible were his agonies in wrestling with God for the life of the
lad, and terrible his fear lest his own faith should fail him if his
prayers should not be heard. Alec Forbes was to Thomas Crann as it were
the representative of all his unsaved brothers and sisters of the human
race, for whose s