them, "it do seem as if the Powers above take a pleasure in tripping us
up when we least expect it."

"Aye," said Bill Hardacre, sitting crying in his wet clothes, "he said
as we were starting he'd got all he wanted now. I thinks to myself at
the time, thinks I, 'That's an unlucky thing to say.'" But who is to
judge luck in this world? Poor little Lily Harrison was a helpless
creature, and had almost 'nothing in her' except vanity.




CHAPTER II.



Sincerely he believed, when he was on his feet again, that his life was
wrecked for ever. He did suffer from insomnia, even with his splendid
sea-seasoned constitution, for months, which proved the poignant
insistency of his grief, making thinking a disease instead of a healthy
function. He performed his duties mechanically, rigidly, like an engine
stoked from the outside. He no longer had pleasure or interest in them.
The flavour was gone from life; it had become a necessary burden, to be
borne as best he could. At one time he even questioned the right of the
Moral Law to ask him to bear it, under the circumstances. He used to
look at the blue water beneath him, and long to be beneath it, sharing
the fate of his loved and lost. He did not want to live without her--
he wanted to die. At twenty-one!

At twenty-three he was a man again, physically and mentally sound,