that
Nance had cooked and sent him. Before he had done with it he cracked the
very bones he had thrown away, for the sake of what was in them, and
finally chewed the softer parts of the bones themselves to cheat himself
into the belief that he was eating.

That was after he had devoured every crumb of his bread, and finished
his three fishes to the extreme points of their tails.

He was, I said, in the very midst of the turmoil yet unaffected by it.
But that was not so in some respects.

Bodily, as we have seen, the storm bore hardly upon him, since
rabbit-bones and fish-tails can hardly be looked upon as a nutritious or
inviting dietary.

But mentally and spiritually the mighty elemental upheaval was wholly
crushing and uplifting.

As he cowered, with humming head, under the fierce unremitting rush of
the gale, and felt the great stones of his shelter tremble in it, and
watched the huge green hills of water, with their roaring white crests,
go sweeping past to crash in thunder on the cliffs of Sark, he felt
smaller than he had ever felt before--and that, as a rule, and if it
come not of self-abnegation through a man's own sin or folly, is
entirely to his good; possibly in the other case also.

To feel infinitely small and helpless in the hands of an Infinitely
Great is a spiritual education to any man, and it was so to this man.

He felt himself, in that universal chaos, no more than a speck of
helpless dust amid the whirling wheels of Nature's inexplicable
machinery, and clung the tighter to the simple fundamental facts of
which his heart was sure--behind and above all this was God, who held
all these things in His hand. And over there in Sark was Nance, the very
thought of whom was like a coal of fire in his heart, which all the
gales that ever blew, and all the soddened soaking of ceaseless rain
from above and ceaseless spray from below, could not even dim.

For long-continued and relentless buffeting such as this tells upon any
man, no matter what his strength of mind or body to begin with; and a
perpetually soaked body is apt in time to sodden the soul, unless it
have something superhuman to cling to, as this man had in his simple
trust in God and the girl he loved.

In all those stressful days, so far as he could see, the tides--which in
those parts rise and fall some forty feet, as you may see by the scoured
bases of the towering cliffs--seemed always at the full, the westerly
gale driving in the wat