Jason, having among his freights the veritable golden fleece, still coursed the seas, but beheld with rapture the fair outlines of the Dreamland coast traced in the far blue and mysterious horizon.  The wind freshened:  hour after hour they were nearing port, and as the whole familiar picture grew more and more distinct, Jason saw the convent towers looming like a great shadow, and afterward the sunny slope whereon the rose-garden grew.

The manner of his quitting the barque before she was fairly within communication with the shore was hardly worthy of his calling.  I forbear to dwell upon this exhibition of human weakness, for almost any one in Jason’s shoes would have been equally regardless of the regulations, and in consequence proportionally unseamanlike.

With soiled garments and unshorn beard Jason ran to the hill.  No one of the idlers in port recognized the returned wanderer, and he assured himself of the fact before venturing upon his visit to the dove-cot where Maud dwelt, for he wished to gaze upon her from afar, and in silence to worship her, unknown and unregarded.  When he reached the wicket, breathless with haste and excitement, he at once beheld the ruin of his hopes—­the thistles in the paths, the roses overgrown and choked with weeds, the sad and general decay.  Jason smote his breast in a paroxysm of despair, while the doves fluttered out from the porch of the cottage in amazement at the approach of a human foot to their domains.

What could it mean? he asked himself again and again, while suspicions taunted him almost to madness.  Up and down that disordered garden he paced like a ghostly sentinel; the doves fluttered to and fro, and were dismayed; the night-winds came in from the chilly sea, and the dews gathered in his beard.  Through the deepening dusk he beheld the lights of the little town below him:  across the solemn silence floated the clear notes of the vesper-bell.  Jason turned toward the tower on the headland.  A single ray of light stealing from one of the high, narrow windows shot through the mist toward heaven.  “The ladder of Jacob’s dream,” said Jason:  “on it the angels are ascending and descending in their visitations.  Oh that I, like Jacob, might receive intelligence from these!”

With the heaviest heart that ever burdened man he returned to the town and entered the open doors of the church, seeking a few moments of repose.  An alien in his own land and unwelcomed of any, Jason sought the good priest and learned the fate of Maud.  She was dead to the world and to him.  It was but the realization of his fears, and he was in some measure prepared for it; yet the best part of the man was killed with the force of that blow.  His only hope was gone.  He set his house in order, like one about to leave it, never to return:  his golden fleece was made over to enrich the convent, and, as the magnanimous offering of a homelesss and nameless voyager, it delights the happy creatures within those walls, and the shrine of the Virgin was made more wonderfully beautiful than it is possible to conceive.