To Geoffrey this seemed very probable, and whenever he got a chance he acted on the hint till at length he was rid of all his cartridges.  Just then it began to rain in torrents.  Though it was not warm the perspiration was streaming from him at every pore, and the rain beating on his face refreshed him somewhat; also with the rain the wind dropped a little.

But he was becoming tired out and he knew it.  Soon he would no longer be able to keep the canoe straight, and then they must be swamped, and in all human probability drowned.  So this was to be the end of his life and its ambitions.  Before another hour had run its course, he would be rolling to and fro in the arms of that angry sea.  What would his wife Honoria say when she heard the news, he wondered?  Perhaps it would shock her into some show of feeling.  And Effie, his dear little six-year-old daughter?  Well, thank God, she was too young to feel his loss for long.  By the time that she was a woman she would almost have forgotten that she ever had a father.  But how would she get on without him to guide her?  Her mother did not love children, and a growing girl would continually remind her of her growing years.  He could not tell; he could only hope for the best.

And for himself!  What would become of him after the short sharp struggle for life?  Should he find endless sleep, or what?  He was a Christian, and his life had not been worse than that of other men.  Indeed, though he would have been the last to think it, he had some redeeming virtues.  But now at the end the spiritual horizon was as dark as it had been at the beginning.  There before him were the Gates of Death, but not yet would they roll aside and show the traveller what lay beyond their frowning face.  How could he tell?  Perhaps they would not open at all.  Perhaps he now bade his last farewell to consciousness, to earth and sky and sea and love and all lovely things.  Well, that might be better than some prospects.  At that moment Geoffrey Bingham, in the last agony of doubt, would gladly have exchanged his hopes of life beyond for a certainty of eternal sleep.  That faith which enables some of us to tread this awful way with an utter confidence is not a wide prerogative, and, as yet, at any rate, it was not his, though the time might come when he would attain it.  There are not very many, even among those without reproach, who can lay them down in the arms of Death, knowing most certainly that when the veil is rent away the countenance that they shall see will be that of the blessed Guardian of Mankind.  Alas! he could not be altogether sure, and where doubt exists, hope is but a pin-pricked bladder.  He sighed heavily, murmured a little formula of prayer that had been on his lips most nights during thirty years—­he had learnt it as a child at his mother’s knee—­and then, while the tempest roared around him, gathered up his strength to meet the end which seemed inevitable.  At any rate he would die like a man.