sten! Listen to the sea!"

The evening had now almost closed in, and all around them the country
lay dark and solitary, broken here and there by tall groups of trees
which at night looked like sable plumes, standing stiff and motionless
in the stirless summer air. Thousands of stars flashed out across this
blackness, throbbing in their orbits with a quick pulsation as of uneasy
hearts beating with nameless and ungratified longing. And through the
tense silence came floating a long, sweet, passionate cry,--a shivering
moan of pain that touched the edge of joy,--a song without words, of
pleading and of prayer, as of a lover, who, debarred from the possession
of the beloved, murmurs his mingled despair and hope to the
unsubstantial dream of his own tortured soul. The sea was calling to the
earth,--calling to her in phrases of eloquent and urgent
music,--caressing her pebbly shores with winding arms of foam, and
showering kisses of wild spray against her rocky bosom. "If I could come
to thee! If thou couldst come to me!" was the burden of the waves,--the
ceaseless craving of the finite for the infinite, which is, and ever
shall be, the great chorale of life. The shuddering sorrow of that low
rhythmic boom of the waters rising and falling fathoms deep under cliffs
which the darkness veiled from view, awoke echoes from the higher hills
around, and David Helmsley, lifting his eyes to the countless
planet-worlds sprinkled thick as flowers in the patch of sky immediately
above him, suddenly realised with a pang how near he was to death,--how
very near to that final drop into the unknown where the soul of man is
destined to find All or Nothing! He trembled,--not with fear,--but with
a kind of anger at himself for having wasted so much of his life. What
had he done, with all his toil and pains? He had gathered a multitude of
riches. Well, and then? Then,--why then, and now, he had found riches
but vain getting. Life and Death were still, as they have always been,
the two supreme Facts of the universe. Life, as ever, asserted itself
with an insistence demanding something far more enduring than the mere
possession of gold, and the power which gold brings. And Death presented
its unwelcome aspect in the same perpetual way as the Last Recorder who,
at the end of the day, closes up accounts with a sum-total paid exactly
in proportion to the work done. No more, and no less. And with Helmsley
these accounts were reaching a figure against