ndly when I left.

"Keep up your heart, my dear sir," said he. "Keep up your courage and
your heart."

"My heart!" I cried. "It's at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean."

He was the first to whom I had said as much. He was a stranger. What did
it matter? And, oh, it was so true--so true.

Every day and all day I was thinking of my love; every hour and all
hours she was before me with her sunny hair and young, young face. Her
wistful eyes were gazing into mine continually. Their wistfulness I
had never realized at the time; but now I did; and I saw it for what it
seemed always to have been, the soft, sad, yearning look of one fated
to die young. So young--so young! And I might live to be an old man,
mourning her.

That I should never love again I knew full well. This time there was no
mistake. I have implied, I believe, that it was for another woman I fled
originally to the diggings. Well, that one was still unmarried, and when
the papers were full of me she wrote me a letter which I now believe to
have been merely kind. At the time I was all uncharitableness; but words
of mine would fail to tell you how cold this letter left me; it was as a
candle lighted in the full blaze of the sun.

With all my bitterness, however, you must not suppose that I had quite
lost the feelings which had inspired me at sunset on the lonely ocean,
while my mind still held good. I had been too near my Maker ever to lose
those feelings altogether. They were with me in the better moments of
these my worst days. I trusted His wisdom still. There was a reason for
everything; there were reasons for all this. I alone had been saved out
of all those souls who sailed from Melbourne in the Lady Jermyn. Why
should I have been the favored one; I with my broken heart and now
lonely life? Some great inscrutable reason there must be; at my worst
I did not deny that. But neither did I puzzle my sick brain with the
reason. I just waited for it to be revealed to me, if it were God's will
ever to reveal it. And that I conceive to be the one spirit in which a
man may contemplate, with equal sanity and reverence, the mysteries and
the miseries of his life.

CHAPTER VII. I FIND A FRIEND

The night after I consulted the specialist I was quite determined to
sleep. I had laid in a bundle of the daily papers. No country cottage
was advertised to let but I knew of it by evening, and about all the
likely ones I had already written. The scheme occupied m