himself to the sharks, when he came before God and his father and mother, he could carry no smiling secret on his face. He would not have kept the faith. He would have broken the laws of God and man. He would have allowed frail women to surpass him in courage, in endurance. He shut his eyes to close out even the imagined look on his mother’s face. So right there Jamie crossed off the Pacific from his scheme of release, and he registered a solemn oath in his breast that no matter what happened, no matter if he again came to the fortunes of the road, to the callous indifference that so many wayfarers encountered, no matter what, anything at all that the most imaginative could think of, he would not take the chance of facing the Creator with a craven soul. He swore by all that he ever had loved and reverenced that he would try, try with all his might in the short time that might remain to him to master the secret that had given birth to the smile, and that whatever of good he might be able to do for the Bee Master or for any one he encountered in the time he had left, as far as he possibly could, he would forget himself, he would put his own pain and chagrin and disappointment, his own feeling of defeat and uselessness, his own craving for love and intellectual companionship in the background, and he would see if the more than six feet of bone and muscle that contained his being could do any small service that might come his way for God and his fellow man before he went. Maybe if he could accomplish some little thing, something that would ease the ache of even one heart that ached as his was aching at that minute, just
