and truth to enter. His self-reproach was the more poignant because it
was silent.

Watching the tempest-swept valley, the tortured forest, where wild life
was in panic, there came upon him the old impulse to put his thoughts
into words, "and so be rid of them," as he was wont to say in other days.
Taking from his pocket some slips of paper, he laid them on the table
before him. Three or four times he leaned over the paper to write, but
the noise of the storm again and again drew his look to the window. The
tempest ceased almost as suddenly as it had come, and, as the first
sunlight broke through the flying clouds, he mechanically lifted a sheet
of the paper and held it up to the light. It brought to his eyes the
large water-mark, Kathleen!

A sombre look passed over his face, he shifted in his chair, then bent
over the paper and began to write. Words flowed from his pen. The lines
of his face relaxed, his eyes lightened; he was lost in a dream. He
thought of the present, and he wrote:

"Wave walls to seaward,
Storm-clouds to leeward,
Beaten and blown by the winds of the West;
Sail we encumbered
Past isles unnumbered,
But never to greet the green island of Rest."

He thought of Father Loisel. He had seen the good man's lips tremble at
some materialistic words he had once used in their many talks, and he
wrote: