life had finished for him.

He felt he could not bear even the two kindly gentlemen whose unspoken
sympathy he knew was his. He could not bear anything human. To-night, at
least, he must be alone with his grief.

All nature was in a mood divine. They were close enough inshore to see the
splendid temples clearly with the naked eye. The sky and the sea were of
the colour only the Mediterranean knows.

It was hot and still, and the moon in her pure magnificence cast her
never-ending spell.

Not a sound of the faintest ripple met his ear. The sailors supped
below. All was silence. On one side the vast sea, on the other the shore,
with this masterpiece of man's genius, the temple of the great god
Poseidon, in this vanished settlement of the old Greeks. How marvellously
beautiful it all was, and how his Queen would have loved it! How she would
have told him its history and woven round it the spirit of the past, until
his living eyes could almost have seen the priests and the people, and
heard their worshipping prayers!

His darling had spoken of it once, he remembered, and had told him it was a
place they must see. He recollected her very words:

"We must look at it first in the winter from the shore, my Paul, and see
those splendid proportions outlined against the sky--so noble and so
perfectly balanced--and then we must see it from the sea, with the
background of the olive hills. It is ever silent and deserted and calm, and
death lurks there after the month of March. A cruel malaria, which we must