The weather was dull, and gray clouds were sweeping across the sky over the swift vessel, which hugged the coast, and, unless the wind shifted, would reach the narrow tongue of land pierced by the Sebennytic mouth of the Nile before sunrise.

Though the general and his wife went to rest early, Hermon could not endure the close air of the cabin.  Wrapped in his cloak he went on deck.  The moon, almost full, was sailing in the sky, sometimes covered by dark clouds, sometimes leaving them behind.  Like a swan emerging from the shadow of the thickets along the shore upon the pure bosom of the lake, it finally floated into the deep azure of the radiant firmament.  Hermon’s heart swelled.

How he rejoiced that he was again permitted to behold the starry sky, and satiate his soul with the beauty of creation!  What delight it gave him that the eternal wanderers above were no longer soulless forms, that he again saw in the pure silver disk above friendly Selene, in the rolling salt waves the kingdom of Poseidon!  To-morrow, when the deep blue water was calm, he would greet the sea-god Glaucus, and when snowy foam crowned the crests of the waves, white-armed Thetis.  The wind was no longer an empty sound to him; no, it, too, came from a deity.  All Nature had regained a new, divine life.  Doubtless he felt much nearer to his childhood than before, but he was infinitely less distant from the eternal divinity.  And all the forms, so full of meaning, which appeared to him from Nature, and from every powerful emotion of his own soul, were waiting to be represented by his art in the noblest of forms, those of human beings.  There were few with whose nature he had not become familiar in the darkness and solitude that once surrounded him.

When he began to create again, he had only to summon them, and he awaited, with the suspense of the general who is in command of new troops on the eve of battle, the success of his own work after the great transformation which had taken place in him.

What a stress and tumult!

He had controlled it since the first hour when he regained his full vision.  He would fain have transformed the moon into the sun, the ship into the studio, and begun to model.

He knew, too, what he desired to create.

He would model an Apollo trampling under foot the slain dragon of darkness.

He would succeed in this work now.  And as he looked up and saw Selene just emerging again from the black cloud island, the thought entered his mind that it was a moonlight night like this when all the unspeakably terrible misfortune occurred—­which was now past.

Yet neither the calm wanderer above nor a resentful woman had exposed him to the persecution of Nemesis.  In the stillness of the desert he had perceived what had brought all this terrible suffering upon him; but he would not repeat it to himself now, for he felt within his soul the power to remain faithful to his best self in the future.