ever forgive himself?)--she had cried, through her sobs of
astonishment and pain:--"To laimin moin?--to batte moin!" (Thou
lovest me?--thou beatest me!) Next month she would have been five
years old. To laimin moin?--to batte moin! ...

A furious paroxysm of grief convulsed him, suffocated him; it
seemed to him that something within must burst, must break. He
flung himself down upon his bed, biting the coverings in order to
stifle his outcry, to smother the sounds of his despair. What
crime had he ever done, oh God! that he should be made to suffer
thus?--was it for this he had been permitted to live? had been
rescued from the sea and carried round all the world unscathed?
Why should he live to remember, to suffer, to agonize? Was not
Ramirez wiser?

How long the contest within him lasted, he never knew; but ere it
was done, he had become, in more ways than one, a changed man.
For the first,--though not indeed for the last time,--something
of the deeper and nobler comprehension of human weakness and of
human suffering had been revealed to him,--something of that
larger knowledge without which the sense of duty can never be
fully acquired, nor the understanding of unselfish goodness, nor
the spirit of tenderness. The suicide is not a coward; he is an
egotist.

A ray of sunlight touched his wet pillow,--awoke him. He rushed
to the window, flung the latticed shutters apart, and looked out.

Something beautiful and ghostly filled all the
vistas,--frost-haze; and in some queer way the mist had