of his temper! Four years with scarce a moment of
solitude--for no shore-leave was ever allowed to one who openly
repudiated any service contract: four years of a life, where the sole
prospect of change was in these engagements, orgies of carnage, so
eagerly anticipated by officers and men alike, including himself,
though for a reason little suspected by his companions. But even the
historic sea-fights of the _Porcupine_, so far as they affected Adrian
Landale, formed in themselves a chain of monotony. It was ever the
same hurling of shot from ship to ship, the same fierce exchange of
cutlass-throws and pike-pushes between men who had never seen each
other before; the same yelling and execrations, sights, sounds, and
smells ever the same in horror; the same cheers when the enemy's
colours were lowered, followed by the same transient depression; the
cleansing of decks from stains of powder and mire of human blood, the
casting overboard of human bodies that had done their life's work,
broken waste and other rubbish. For weeks Adrian after would taste
blood, smell blood, dream blood, till it seemed in his nausea that all
the waters of the wide clean seas could never wash the taint from him
again. And before the first horrid impressions had time to fade, the
next occasion would have come round again: it was not the fate of
Adrian Landale that either steel or shot, or splintered timber or
falling tackles should put an end to his dreary life, welcome as such
an end would have been to him then.

Then ... but not now. Remembering now his unaccountable escape from
the destruction which had swept from his side many another whose
eagerness for the fray had certes not sprung, like his own, from a
desire to court destruction, he shuddered. And there arose in his mind
the trite old adage:

"Man proposeth..."

God had disposed otherwise.

It was not destined that Adrian Landale should be shot on the high
seas any more than he should be drowned in the rolling mud of the
Vilaine--he was reserved for this day as a set-off to all the
bitterness that had been meted out to him; he was to see the image of
his dead love rise from the sea once more. And, meanwhile, his very
despair and sullenness had been turned to his good. It would not be
said, if history should take count of the fact, that while the Lord of
Pulwick had served four years before the mast, he had ever disgraced
his name by cowardice....

Whether such reasonings were in