s to a dull repetition
calling him from sleep to perform the spiritless daily round. He did
not sigh that the definite vision had faded; it happened so, may be, to
most men, though not to all. To most men, it might be, their fate
played the crimp; they followed the marsh-fires out into just such a
blind waste as this through which he and his men were groping--darkness
above and below; darkness before, behind, to right, to left; darkness
of birth, of death, and only the palpable fog between. He did not sigh
for this. What irked him was the thought that while he had followed the
mill-round of duty, strength had been ebbing away and had left him
useless.

Yes, there lay the sting. Twenty years ago how like a schoolboy he
would have dashed into this fog, careless of consequence, eager only to
find where men needed his help! He might have found, or missed; but
twenty years ago men would have hailed his will to help. Now he was
useless, negligible. In an ordinary way these neighbours of his might
disguise their knowledge, through politeness or pity; but at a crisis
like this the truth came out. The Lord Proprietor had treated him as a
pantaloon, and these lifeboatmen--so little they valued him--could not
be at the pains of catching a rope.

He steered, as nearly as he could calculate, west-by-south, allowing at
a guess for the set of the tide. The wall of fog, which let pass no
true sound, itself seemed full of voices--hissing of spent waves,
sucking of water under weed-covered ledges, little puffs and moanings
of the wind. He had reckoned that he was bending around shore to the
south of the roadstead, heading gradually for St. Lide's Sound and
giving the rocks on his port hand a wide berth; when of a sudden
Archelaus called out, and he spied a grey line of breaking
water--luckily the sea was full of briming to-night--at the base of the
fog, quite close at hand. It scared them so that they headed off almost
at right angles. This adventure not only proved his reckoning to be
wrong, but complicated it hopelessly.

They were in open water again, still making--or at any rate the boat so
pointed--west-by-south. The short scare had shaken him out of his
brooding thoughts. He saw now, minute after minute, but the sea beyond
the edge of the boat's gunwale, heaving up and sliding astern as it
caught the shine of the lantern. The lantern shone also against the
knees of Archelaus, and lit up the check-board pattern of the
eleemosyna