Then, thoughts would race back to the mutiny on the stormy sea, to the roar of the breakers crashing over decks, to M. Radisson leaping up from dripping wreckage, muttering between his teeth—­“Blind god o’ chance, they may crush, but they shall not conquer; they may kill, but I snap my fingers in their faces to the death!”

Then, uncalled, through the darkness comes her face.

“God is love,” says she.

If I lie there like a log, never moving, she seems to stay; but if I feel out through the darkness for the grip of a living hand, for the substance of a reality on which souls anchor, like the shadow of a dream she is gone.

I mind once in the misty region between delirium and consciousness, when the face slipped from me like a fading light, I called out eagerly that love was a phantom; for her God of love had left me to the blind gods that crush, to the storm and the dark and the ravening wolves.

Like a light flaming from dark, the face shone through the gloom.

“Love, a phantom,” laughs the mocking voice of the imperious Hortense I knew long ago; and the thrill of her laugh proves love the realest phantom life can know.

Then the child Hortense becomes of a sudden the grown woman, grave and sweet, with eyes in the dark like stars, and strange, broken thoughts I had not dared to hope shining unspoken on her face.

“Life, a phantom-substance, the shadow—­love, the all,” the dream-face seems to be saying.  “Events are God’s thoughts—­storms and darkness and prey are his puppets, the blind gods, his slaves-God is love; for you are here! . . .  You are here! . . .  You are here with me!”

When I feel through the dark this time is the grip of a living hand.

Then we lock arms and sweep through space, the northern lights curtaining overhead, the stars for torches, and the blazing comets heralding a way.

“The very stars in their courses fight for us,” says Hortense.

And I, with an earthy intellect groping behind the winged love of the woman, think that she refers to some of M. Picot’s mystic astrologies.

“No—­no,” says the dream-face, with the love that divines without speech, “do you not understand?  The stars fight for us—­because—­because——­”

“Because God is love,” catching the gleam of the thought; and the stars that fight in their courses for mortals sweep to a noonday splendour.

And all the while I was but a crazy dreamer lying captive, wounded and weak in a pirate cave.  Oh, yes, I know very well what my fine gentlemen dabblers in the new sciences will say—­the fellow was daft and delirious—­he had lost grip on reality and his fevered wits mixed a mumble-jumble of ancient symbolism with his own adventures.  But before you reduce all this great universe to the dimensions of a chemist’s crucible, I pray you to think twice whether the mind that fashioned the crucible be not greater than the crucible; whether