she knew but too well how to punish her votaries when they reverted from
the ephemeral to the stable mood. When was it to end--this curse of his
heart not ageing while his frame moved naturally onward? Perhaps only
with life.

His first act the day after depositing her in her own house was to go
to the chapel where, by her statement, the marriage had been solemnized,
and make sure of the fact. Perhaps he felt an illogical hope that she
might be free, even then, in the tarnished condition which such freedom
would have involved. However, there stood the words distinctly: Isaac
Pierston, Ann Avice Caro, son and daughter of So-and-so, married on such
a day, signed by the contracting parties, the officiating minister, and
the two witnesses.

2. XIII. SHE IS ENSHROUDED FROM SIGHT

One evening in early winter, when the air was dry and gusty, the dark
little lane which divided the grounds of Sylvania Castle from the
cottage of Avice, and led down to the adjoining ruin of Red-King Castle,
was paced by a solitary man. The cottage was the centre of his beat; its
western limit being the gates of the former residence, its eastern the
drawbridge of the ruin. The few other cottages thereabout--all as if
carved from the solid rock--were in darkness, but from the upper window
of Avice's tiny freehold glimmered a light. Its rays were repeated from
the far-distant sea by the lightship lying moored over the mysterious
Shambles quicksand, which brought tamelessness and domesticity into due
position as balanced opposites.

The sea moaned--more than moaned--among the boulders below the ruins,
a throe of its tide being timed to regular intervals. These sounds were
accompanied by an equally periodic moan from the interior of the cottage
chamber; so that the articulate heave of water and the articulate
heave of life seemed but differing utterances of the selfsame troubled
terrestrial Being--which in one sense they were.

Pierston--for the man in the lane was he--would look from lightship to
cottage window; then back again, as he waited there between the travail
of the sea without, and the travail of the woman within. Soon an
infant's wail of the very feeblest was also audible in the house. He
started from his easy pacing, and went again westward, standing at the
elbow of the lane a long time. Then the peace of the sleeping village
which lay that way was broken by light wheels and the trot of a horse.
Pierston went back to the cottage