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.