more to
see.

Memory cannot produce a picture that Imagination has not retouched; and
her pictures, even the ones least touched by Imagination, are no mere
photographs, but the world of an artist. All that is inessential she
casts away, all that is essential she retains; she idealises, and that
is why her picture of a lost mistress has had power to keep a man a
celibate to the end of his days, and why she can break a human heart
with the picture of a dead child. She is a painter, but she is also a
poet.

The picture before the mind of Lestrange was filled with this almost
diabolical poetry, for in it the little boat and her helpless crew were
represented adrift on a blue and sunlit sea. A sea most beautiful to
look at, yet most terrible, bearing as it did the recollections of
thirst.

He had been dying, when, raising himself on his elbow, so to say, he
looked at this picture. It recalled him to life. His willpower asserted
itself, and he refused to die.

The will of a man has, if it is strong enough, the power to reject
death. He was not in the least conscious of the exercise of this power;
he only knew that a great and absorbing interest had suddenly arisen in
him, and that a great aim stood before him--the recovery of the
children.

The disease that was killing him ceased its ravages, or rather was
slain in its turn by the increased vitality against which it had to
strive. He left the hospital and took up his quarters at the Palace
Hotel, and then, like the General of an army, he began to formulate his
plan of campaign against Fate.

When the crew of the Northumberland had stampeded, hurling their
officers aside, lowering the boats with a rush, and casting themselves
into the sea, everything had been lost in the way of ship's papers; the
charts, the two logs--everything, in fact, that could indicate the
latitude and longitude of the disaster. The first and second officers
and a midshipman had shared the fate of the quarter-boat; of the
fore-mast hands saved, not one, of course, could give the slightest
hint as to the locality of the spot.

A time reckoning from the Horn told little, for there was no record of
the log. All that could be said was that the disaster had occurred
somewhere south of the line.

In Le Farge's brain lay for a certainty the position, and Lestrange
went to see the captain in the "Maison de Sante," where he was being
looked after, and found him quite recovered from the furious mania