Where the Path Breaks

								


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WHERE THE PATH BREAKS
By CAPTAIN CHARLES de CRÉSPIGNY
"Only the dark, where the path breaks off and the milestones end."
S. B. GUNDY--TORONTO
PUBLISHER IN CANADA FOR HUMPHREY MILFORD

Copyright, 1916, by
The Century Co.
Published, March, 1916

TO THE
WONDERFUL EYES
NEVER FORGOTTEN

PART I
THE AWAKENING

WHERE THE PATH BREAKS
CHAPTER I

In dim twilight a spark of life glittered, glinted like a bit of mica
catching the sun, on a vast face of gray cliff above a dead gray sea.
There was nothing else in the world but the vastness and the grayness
of the cliff and the sea, till the spark felt the faint thrill of
warmth which gave to it the knowledge of its own life. "I am alive,"
the whisper stirred, far down in the depths of consciousness. Next the
question came, "What am I?"
At first just that infinitesimal bright glint lived where all the rest
was dead, or creation not yet begun. Then slowly the answer followed
the question: "I am I. A man. I was a man. I am dead. This is the
twilight between worlds. I must dream back. I must know myself as I
was. Later I shall wake and know what I am."
The soul was very still, tired after an all-but-forgotten struggle. It
was beginning to remember that it had suffered infinitely. It was
patient, with all the patience of eternity before it. There was no
hurry. Hurry and turmoil seemed strange and remote, part of some
outworn experience. Lying still, it passively waited for the dream to
begin. For a moment--or perhaps years--there remained only the gray
blankness of the empty world; but the spark of life grew in brightness
as a star grows to visibility in the pallor of an evening sky. Then,
suddenly, a face flashed into existence--a girl's face.
"I knew her. I loved her," the soul remembered with a thrill, like a
shooting ray of the star that was itself. "Where? Who was she? What
were we to each other?"
The dream began to take on definiteness. The soul groped back to find
its body and its lost place in the world. Not this gray limbo, but the
sad and happy, the glorious and terrible world whence it had somehow
passed.
The girl's face faded away for an instant, and the face of a man seemed
to be reflected in a blurred mirror. The eyes of the soul looked into
the man's eyes and knew them. They were his own. He was that man, or
had been. "What a dull dog you are," he heard himself say, as if he had
said it long ago, said it often, and the echo had followed him to this
twilit place beyond death. He thought the face was rather like a dog's,
an ugly mongrel dog's. The girl could not possibly care for him! Yet
some one had told him that she did care, and that she would marry him
if he asked. "I'm her mother. I ought to know!" As he heard the woman's
voice speaking the words, he saw the face that belonged to the voice: