Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/224

Could he not have treated Lee differently? Had he not been too stern and sour with the poor devil? "For God knows," he cried within himself, "we are all poor devils together." Had it been a test, long, secret, subtle, and had he failed once more through dullness? Perhaps all the years of night-long watching, without complaint, showed him only a hard-hearted prig, a weakling Pharisee. Or if not, were they all to go for nothing because the watchman had been false a single night? These and a hundred worse questions hounded him over a black, shifting wilderness of despair. He was alone. There was no creature believed in him or loved him, not even his mother, of whom he dared not think. The remembrance of the starry night aboard the Merry Andrew, of the spring walks alone that had strengthened his devotion, rose in his mind like pale glimpses in the life of some other man, long ago. Surely that boy—and yet here he sat, a murderer, with the eldest primal curse upon him. He groaned aloud, and flinging back his head, looked up into the infinite brightness