im so much of that congenial solitude. There, if always with his ship
(but that was an integral part of him) he could always be as solitary as
he chose. Yes. Get out to sea!

The night of the town with its strings of lights, rigid, and crossed like
a net of flames, thrown over the sombre immensity of walls, closed round
him, with its artificial brilliance overhung by an emphatic blackness,
its unnatural animation of a restless, overdriven humanity. His thoughts
which somehow were inclined to pity every passing figure, every single
person glimpsed under a street lamp, fixed themselves at last upon a
figure which certainly could not have been seen under the lamps on that
particular night. A figure unknown to him. A figure shut up within high
unscaleable walls of stone or bricks till next morning . . . The figure
of Flora de Barral's father. De Barral the financier--the convict.

There is something in that word with its suggestions of guilt and
retribution which arrests the thought. We feel ourselves in the presence
of the power of organized society--a thing mysterious in itself and still
more mysterious in its effect. Whether guilty or innocent, it was as if
old de Barral had been down to the Nether Regions. Impossible to imagine
what he would bring out from there to the light of this world of
uncondemned men. What would he think? What would he have to say? And
what was one to say to him?

Anthony, a little awed, as one is by a range of feelings stretching
beyond one's grasp, comforted himself by the thought that probably the
old fellow would have little to say. He wouldn't want to talk about it.
No man would. It must have been a real hell to him.

And then Anthony, at the end of the day in which he had gone through a
marriage ceremony with Flora de Barral, ceased to think of Flora's father
except, as in some sort, the captive of his triumph. He turned to the
mental contemplation of the white, delicate and appealing face with great
blue eyes which he had seen weep and wonder and look profoundly at him,
sometimes with incredulity, sometimes with doubt and pain, but always
irresistible in the power to find their way right into his breast, to
stir there a deep response which was something more than love--he said to
himself,--as men understand it. More? Or was it only something other?
Yes. It was something other. More or less. Something as incredible as
the fulfilment of an amazing and startling dream i