pon a lonely beach, where no craft anchoreth;
That I may steep my soul therein, and craving naught, nor
fearing,
Drift on through slumber to a dream, and through a dream to
death.'

"My ear was close to her breast, listening, as the last breath went
out with a flutter . . . and Santa was dead, having conquered me--
conquered me far beyond my guessing; but up to the moment having
subdued me so effectively that my sole kiss of her had been taken,
kneeling, upon the wrist, as one kisses faith to a sovereign, and had
never been returned. Through the night I held her wrist until it was
cold."

"Towards dawn, and just at that moment when a watcher's spirits are
at their lowest, Farrell stirred, stretched out his legs, drew them
up again, and asked how things were? . . . For his part (he added,
sitting up weakly), he felt a different man.

"'It behoves you to be,' said I with some sternness. 'Take the
tiller and--yes, you may hold on to it with some firmness. Your wife
is dead.'

"'Santa!' he gasped. 'Oh, my God!' and cast himself upon her body,
seemly bestowed as I could serve it.

"'Get off of it,' I shouted, 'before I brain you!' I held the very
gaff with which Grimalson had torn my arm. He had plucked the tiller
from the rudder-head, and with these two weapons in our right hands
we faced one another, each with his left feeling for the revolver he
carried.

"Then Farrell, who stood facing the bows, shot out his right as
if jabbing at me with the stick, a foot short of my shoulder.
The action was, as a stroke, so idiotic that, although it might so
easily have meant death to me, I turned half-about to where the stick
pointed, as the helmless boat yawed.

"And there, above the low-lying wisps of morning fog, stood three
peaks: two sharp and the third blunted: and, below the fog, ran a
thin white ribbon of breaking water!

"We had run down upon it so close in those hours of darkness that the
beat of the surf had, as I now recognised, confused itself into
Santa's last breathings: so close that, as the sun took swift mastery
of the mist and dissolved it, disclosing, below the peaks, the
variegated greenery of lawn and forest pouring down to the seamed
cliffs and pouring over them to the very beaches in tapestries of
vines and creepers, we were almost in the ring of the surf: and it
came as a shock to me that the lazy swell on which we had so long
lifted and dropped, heeding it least a