sked.

"Yes, Philip," came the reply obediently.

After a moment of speech with Madame Landresse, Philip stooped to say
good-bye to the child. "Good-bye, Guida."

A queer, mischievous little smile flitted over her face--a second, and
it was gone.

"Good-bye, sir--Philip," she said, and they parted. Her last words
kept ringing in his ears as he made his way homeward. "Good-bye,
sir--Philip"--the child's arrangement of words was odd and amusing, and
at the same time suggested something more. "Good-bye, Sir Philip," had a
different meaning, though the words were the same.

"Sir Philip--eh?" he said to himself, with a jerk of the head--"I'll be
more than that some day."

CHAPTER II

The night came down with leisurely gloom. A dim starlight pervaded
rather than shone in the sky; Nature seemed somnolent and gravely
meditative. It brooded as broods a man who is seeking his way through
a labyrinth of ideas to a conclusion still evading him. This sense of
cogitation enveloped land and sea, and was as tangible to feeling as
human presence.

At last the night seemed to wake from reverie. A movement, a thrill, ran
through the spangled vault of dusk and sleep, and seemed to pass over
the world, rousing the sea and the earth. There was no wind, apparently
no breath of air, yet the leaves of the trees moved, the weather-vanes
turned slightly, the animals in the byres roused themselves, and
slumbering folk opening their eyes, turned over in their beds, and
dropped into a troubled doze again.

Presently there came a long moaning sound from the tide, not loud but
rather mysterious and distant--a plaint, a threatening, a warning, a
prelude?

A dull labourer, returning from late toil, felt it, and raised his head
in a perturbed way, as though some one had brought him news of a far-off
disaster. A midwife, hurrying to a lowly birth-chamber, shivered and
gathered her mantle more closely about her. She looked up at the sky,
she looked out over the sea, then she bent her head and said to herself
that this would not be a good night, that ill-luck was in the air. "The
mother or the child will die," she said to herself. A 'longshoreman,
reeling home from deep potations, was conscious of it, and, turning
round to the sea, snarled at it and said yah! in swaggering defiance.
A young lad, wandering along the deserted street, heard it, began
to tremble, and sat down on a block of stone beside the doorway of a
baker's shop. He dropp