“Well, I hardly know,” he replied, after a long pause,—­“Looking back upon everything, I rather doubt it!  I married as most men marry—­on impulse.  I saw a pretty face—­and it seemed advisable that I should marry—­but I cannot say I was moved by any great or absorbing passion for the woman I chose.  She was charming and amiable in our courting days—­as a wife she became peevish and querulous,—­apt to sulk, too,—­and she devoted herself almost entirely to the most commonplace routine of life;—­however, I had nothing to justly complain of.  We lived five years together before her child Catherine was born,—­and then she died.  I cannot say that either her life or her death left any deep mark upon me—­not if I am honest.  I don’t think I understand love—­certainly not the love which Rafel Santoris looks upon as the secret key of the Universe.”

Instinctively my eyes turned towards the ‘Dream’ at anchor.  She looked like a phantom vessel in the moonlight.  Again the faint shiver of cold ran through my veins like a sense of spiritual terror.  If I should lose now what I had lost before!  This was my chief thought,—­my hidden shuddering fear.  Did the whole responsibility rest with me, I wondered?  Mr. Harland laid his hand kindly on my arm.

“You look like a wan spirit in the moonbeams,” he said—­“So pale and wistful!  You are tired, and I am selfish in keeping you up here to talk to me.  Go down to your cabin.  I can see you are full of mystical dreams, and I am afraid Santoris has rather helped you to indulge in them.  He is of the same nature as you are—­inclined to believe that this life as we live it is only one phase of many that are past and of many yet to come.  I wish I could accept that faith!”

“I wish you could!” I said—­“You surely would be happier.”

“Should I?” He gave a quick sigh.  “I have my doubts!  If I could be young and strong and lie through many lives always possessed of that same youth and strength, then there would be something in it—­but to be old and ailing, no!  The Faust legend is an eternal truth—­Life is only worth living as long as we enjoy it.”

“Your friend Santoris enjoys it!” I said.

“Ah!  There you touch me!  He does enjoy it, and why?  Because he is young!  Though nearly as old in years as I am, he is actually young!  That’s the mystery of him!  Santoris is positively young—­young in heart, young in thought, ambition, feeling and sentiment, and yet—­ "

He broke off for a moment, then resumed.

“I don’t know how he has managed it, but he told me long ago that it was a man’s own fault if he allowed himself to grow old.  I laughed at him then, but he has certainly carried his theories into fact.  He used to declare that it was either yourself or your friends that made you old.  ‘You will find,’ he said, ’as you go on in years, that your family relations, or your professing dear friends, are those that will chiefly insist on your