water but the funnel of the steamer.

He slung a tarpaulin by chains overboard and hung it over the hole.
Pressure of the sea held it tight. The wound was stanched. Gilliatt
began to bale for dear life. As he emptied the hole the tarpaulin bulged
in, as if a fist were pushing it from outside. He ran for his clothes;
brought them, and stuffed them into the wound.

He was saved--for a few moments.

Death was certain. He had succeeded in the impossible, to fail in what a
shipwright might have mended in a few minutes.

Upon that solitary rock he had been subjected by turns to all the varied
and cruel tortures of nature. He had conquered his isolation, conquered
hunger, conquered thirst, conquered cold, conquered fever, conquered
labour, conquered sleep. A dismal irony was then the end of all.
Gilliatt climbed to the top of the rock and gazed wildly into space. He
had no clothing. He stood naked in the midst of that immensity.

Then, overwhelmed by the sense of that unknown infinity, like one
bewildered by a strange persecution, confronting the shadows of night,
in the midst of the murmur of the waves, the swell, the foam, the
breeze, under that vast diffusion of force, having around him and
beneath him the ocean, above him the constellations, under him the great
unfathomable deep, he sank, gave up the struggle, laid down upon the
rock, humbled, and uplifting his joined hands towards the terrible
depths, he cried aloud, "Have mercy!"

When he issued from his swoon, the sun was high in a cloudless sky. The
blessed heat had saved the poor, broken, naked man upon the rock. He
rose up refreshed, and filled with divine energy. A day's work sufficed
to mend the gap in the sloop's side. On the following day, dressed in
the tattered garments which had stuffed the rent, with a favourable
breeze and a good sea, Gilliatt pushed off from the Douvres.

_IV.--Fate's Last Blow_

Gilliatt arrived in harbour at night. He went ashore in his rags, and
hovered for a while about the darkness of Lethierry's house. Then he
made his way into the garden, like an animal returning to its hole. He
sat himself down and looked about him. He saw the garden, the pathways,
the beds of flowers, the house, the two windows of Derouchette's
chamber. He felt it horrible to be obliged to breathe; he did what he
could to prevent it.

To see those windows was almost too much happiness for Gilliatt.

Suddenly he saw her.

Derouchette approached. She