it was not the elder! Providence is kind.' She meant kind to the
House of Aylwin. I often wonder whether she guessed that I heard her.
I often wonder whether she knew how I had loved her.

This is how matters stood with me on that summer afternoon, when I
sat on the edge of the cliff in a kind of dull, miserable dream.
Suddenly, at the moment when the huge mass of clouds had covered the
entire surface of the water between Flinty Point and Needle Point
with their rich purple shadow, it seemed to me that the waves began
to sparkle and laugh in a joyful radiance which they were making for
themselves. And at that same moment an unwonted sound struck my ear
from the churchyard behind me--a strange sound indeed in that
deserted place--that of a childish voice singing.

Was, then, the mighty ocean writing symbols for an unhappy child to
read? My father, from whose book, _The Veiled Queen_, the extract
with which this chapter opens is taken, would, unhesitatingly,
have answered 'Yes.'

'Destiny, no doubt, in the Greek drama concerns itself only with the
great,' says he, in that wonderful book of his. 'But who are the
great? With the unseen powers, mysterious and imperious, who govern
while they seem not to govern all that is seen, who are the great? In
a world where man's loftiest ambitions are to higher intelligences
childish dreams, where his highest knowledge is ignorance, where his
strongest strength is to heaven a derision--who are the great? Are
they not the few men and women and children on the earth who greatly
love?'