the wind was now singing,--broke from his
blanched lips. And another, and another, and then silence; for Kenrick
was now crouching at the cliff's foot furthest off from the swelling
flood, with his eyes fixed motionless in a wild stare on its advancing
line of foam. He was conjuring up before his imagination the time when
those waves should have reached him; should have swept him away from the
shelter of the shore, or risen above his lips; should have forced him
again to struggle and swim, until his strength, already impaired by
hunger, and thirst, and cold, and fatigue, should have failed him
altogether, and he would sink, and the water gurgle wildly in his ears,
and stop his breath--and all would be still. And when he had pictured
this scene to himself with a vividness which made him experience all its
agony, for a time his mind flew back through all the faultful past up to
that very day; memory lighted her lantern, and threw its blaze on every
dark corner, on every hidden recess, every forgotten nook--left no spot
unsearched, unilluminated with sudden flash; all his past sins were
before him, words, looks, thoughts, everything. As when a man descends
with a light in his diving-bell into the heaving sea, the strange
monsters of the deep, attracted by the unknown glimmer, throng and
wallow terribly around him, so did uncouth thoughts and forgotten sins
welter in fearful multitudes round this light of memory in the deep sea
of that poor human soul. And finally, as though in demon voices, came
this message whispered to him, touted to him tauntingly, rising and
falling with maddening alternation on the rising and falling of the
wind--"You have been wasting your life, moodily abandoning yourself to
idle misery, neglecting your duties, letting your talents rust--_God
will take from you the life you know not how to use_." And then, as
though in answer to this, another voice, low, soft, sweet, that his
heart knew well--another voice filling the interspaces of the others
with unseen music, whispered to him soothingly--"It shall be given you
again, use it better; awake, use it better, _it shall be given you
again_."

Those three wild shrieks of his had been heard; he did not know it, but
they had been heard. The whole coast was in general so lonely that you
could usually pace it for miles without meeting a single human being,
and it never even occurred to him that some one might pass that way.
But it so happened that th