, towards the middle of the Bay of Bengal.

When he had departed, while the noise of the carriage that was bearing
him away could still be heard, my mother turned to me with an expression
of love that touched me to the very innermost fibre of my being; and as
she drew me to her she said with the emphasis of conviction: "Thank God,
at least we shall keep you with us!"

Keep me! . . . They would keep me! . . . Oh! . . . I lowered my head and
turned my eyes away, for I could feel that their expression had changed,
had become a little wild. I could not respond to my mother with a word
or a caress.

Such a serene confidence upon her part distressed me cruelly, for the
moment in which I heard her say, "We shall keep you," I understood, for
the first time in my life, what a firm hold on my mind the project of
going away had taken--of going even farther than my brother, of going
everywhere upon the face of the earth.

A sea-faring life terrified me, and I relished the idea of it as little
as ever. To a little being like me, so greatly attached to my home,
bound to it by a thousand sweet ties, the very thought of it made my
heart bleed. And besides, how could I break the news of such a decision
to my parents, how give them so much pain and thus flagrantly outrage
their wishes! But to renounce all my plans, always to remain in the same
place, to be upon this earth, and to see nothing of it--what a squalid,
disenchanting future! What was the use to live, what the good of growing
up for that?

And in that empty parlor with its disordered chairs, one even
overturned, and while I was still under the dark spell of our sad
farewells, there beside my mother, leaning against her with eyes turned
away and with soul overwhelmed with sorrow, I suddenly remembered the
old log-book which I had read at sunset last spring at Limoise. The
short sentences written down upon the old paper with yellow ink came
slowly back to me one after the other with a charm as lulling and
perfidious as that exercised by a magic incantation:

"Fair weather . . . beautiful sea . . . light breeze from the south-east
. . . Shoals of dolphins . . . passing to larboard."

And with a shudder of almost religious awe, with pantheistic ecstasy, my
inward eye saw all about me the sad and vast blue splendor of the South
Pacific Ocean.

A great calm, tinged with melancholy, fell upon us after my brother's
departure, and to me the days were monotonous in the extreme.