d himself panting, panting
raucously, with a sound that was neither a moan nor a sob, but which
racked him convulsively, while there was a hot smarting in his eyes.

But in the end he found relief and worked his way out to a sort of
victory. That is to say, he came back to see, as he had seen all along,
that there was one clear duty to be done. If he loved Olivia Guion with
a love that was worthy to win, it must also be with a love that could
lose courageously. This was no new discovery. It was only a fact which
loneliness and the craving to be something to her, as she was everything
to him, had caused him for the moment to lose sight of. But he came back
to it with conviction. It was conviction that gave him confidence, that
calmed him, enabling him, as a clock somewhere struck eleven, to get up,
shake the sea-spray from his person, and return to his hotel.

It was while he was going to bed that Rodney Temple's words came back to
him, as they did from time to time: "Some call it God."

"I wonder if it is--God," he questioned.

* * * * *

But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the
morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely
and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from
railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His
assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an
obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of
this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they
sped had once--and not so many years ago--been the border of the bed of
the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and
edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river,
and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of
a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville,
having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these
interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the
noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the
craft on its bosom--steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the
farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as _The Flying Dutchman_
in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen;
fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages,
clambering over cliffs to a