-gray, although limpid of surface, were heavy with the
sadness of a sad spirit. Their natural fire was quenched just as the
slight compression of her lips had lessened the sensuous fulness of
their curves.

But she had suffered so bitterly and so variously that the points had
been broken off her nerves, she told herself, and, excepting when her
trouble mounted suddenly like a wave within her, her mind was tranquil.
Grief with her had expressed itself in all its forms. She had known what
it was to be crushed into semi-insensibility; she had thrilled as the
tears rushed and the sobs shook her until every nerve ached and her very
fingers cramped; and she had gone wild at other times, burying her head,
that her screams might not be heard: the last, as imagination pictured
her lover's certain physical suffering. But of all agonies, none could
approximate to that induced by Death. When that rumour reached her,
she realized that hope had given her some measure of support, and
how insignificant all other trouble is beside that awful blank, that
mystery, whose single revelation is the houseless soul's unreturning
flight from the only world we are sure of. When the contradicting rumour
came, she clutched at hope and clung to it.

"It is the only reason I do not kill myself," she thought, as she stood
on the jutting brow of the cliff and looked down on the masses of huge
stones which, with the gaunt outlying rocks, had once hung on the face
of the crags. The great breakers boiled over them with the ponderosity
peculiar to the waters of the Pacific. The least of those breakers would
carry her far into the hospitable ocean.

"It is so easy to die and be at peace; the only thing which makes life
supportable is the knowledge of Death's quick obedience. And the tragedy
of life is not that we cannot forget, but that we can. Think of being an
old woman with not so much as a connecting current between the memory
and the heart, the long interval blocked with ten thousand petty events
and trials! It must be worse than this. I shall have gone over the cliff
long before that time comes. I would go to-day, but I cannot leave the
world while he is in it."

She drew a case from her pocket, and opened it. It showed the portrait
of a young man with the sombre eyes and cynical mouth of the northern
European, a face revealing intellect, will, passion, and much
recklessness. Eyes and hair were dark, the face smooth but for a slight
mustache.

N