Christie Bayle would begin to study the stars once more, as if seeking to read therein his future; but in vain, for he gazed down where they were broken and confused in the dark waters, sparkling and gliding as they were repeated again below, deep down in the transparent depths, where phosphorescent creatures glowed here and there.
“I can’t make him out,” Sir Gordon would often say to himself.
No wonder! Christie Bayle could not analyse his own feelings, only that the old sorrow that was dead and buried years upon years ago seemed to be reviving and growing till it was becoming an agonising pang.
End of Volume Two.
Volume Three—Chapter Fourteen.
Lady Eaton’s Son.
It was a long voyage, for in those days the idea of shortening a trip to the Antipodes had not been dreamed of, and the man who had suggested that the time would come when powerful steamers would run through the Mediterranean, down a canal, along the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, touch at Singapore, and after threading their way among the tropic Indian Islands, pass down the eastern side of the Australian continent within shelter of the Great Barrier Reef, would have been called a madman.
But long and tedious as it was made by calms, in what seemed to be a region of eternal summer, Christie Bayle prayed that the voyage might be prolonged.