ve on!
Oh, hadst thou but reached us a minute later!--ah, God, or a minute
earlier!

Rarely had Sir Adrian's haunting visions of the past assumed such
lurid reality. Rising in torment from the hearth to pace unceasingly
the length and breadth of the restful, studious room, so closely
secure from the outer turmoil of heaven and earth, he is once more
back in the unknown sea-cave, in front of the angry breakers. Slowly,
agonisingly, he is recalled to life through wheeling spaces of pain
and confusion, only that his bruised and smarting eyes may see the
actual proof of his own desolateness--a small, stark figure wrapped in
coarse sailcloth, which now two or three ragged, long-haired men are
silently lifting between them.

He wonders, at first, vaguely, why the tears course down those wild,
dark faces; and then, as vainly he struggles to speak, and is gently
held down by some unknown hand, the little white bundle is gone, and
he knows that _there_ was the pitiful relict of his love--that he will
never see her again!

* * * * *

Sir Adrian halted in front of his seaward window, staring at the
driven rain, which bounded and plashed and spread in minute torrents
down the glass, obscuring the already darkening vision of furious sea
and sky.

The dog, that for some moments had shown an anxious restlessness in
singular concert with his master's, now rose at last to sniff beneath
the door. No sound penetrated the roar of the blast; but the old
retriever's uneasiness, his sharp, warning bark at length recalled Sir
Adrian's wandering thoughts to the present. And, walking up to the
door, he opened it.

Oh, God! Had the sea given up its dead?

Sir Adrian staggered back, fell on his knees and clapped his hands
together with an agonised cry:

"Cecile...!"

CHAPTER VI

THE WHEEL OF TIME

And to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him.

BYRON.

Upon the threshold she stood, looking in upon him with dark, luminous
eyes; round the small wet face tangles of raven hair fell limp and
streaming; dark raiments clung to her form, diapered with sand and
sea-foam, sodden with the moisture that dripped from them to the
floor; under the hem of her skirt one foot peered forth, shoeless in
its mud-stained stocking.

Sir Adrian stared up at her, his brain whirling with a frenzy of joy,
gripped in its soaring ecstasy by terr