of fire, the restless shadow
that like a suspicion of an evil truth darkens everything upon the earth
on its passage, had enveloped her, had stood arrested as if to remain
with her forever.

And there was such a finality in that illusion, such an accord with the
trend of her thought that when she murmured into the darkness a faint
"so be it" she seemed to have spoken one of those sentences that resume
and close a life.

As a young girl, often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had
dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal
fulfilment and the only truth of life. Entering the world she discovered
that ideal to be unattainable because the world is too prudent to
be sincere. Then she hoped that she could find the truth of life an
ambition which she understood as a lifelong devotion to some unselfish
ideal. Mr. Travers' name was on men's lips; he seemed capable of
enthusiasm and of devotion; he impressed her imagination by his
impenetrability. She married him, found him enthusiastically devoted to
the nursing of his own career, and had nothing to hope for now.

That her husband should be bewildered by the curious misunderstanding
which had taken place and also permanently grieved by her disloyalty
to his respectable ideals was only natural. He was, however, perfectly
satisfied with her beauty, her brilliance, and her useful connections.
She was admired, she was envied; she was surrounded by splendour and
adulation; the days went on rapid, brilliant, uniform, without a glimpse
of sincerity or true passion, without a single true emotion--not even
that of a great sorrow. And swiftly and stealthily they had led her on
and on, to this evening, to this coast, to this sea, to this moment of
time and to this spot on the earth's surface where she felt unerringly
that the moving shadow of the unbroken night had stood still to remain
with her forever.

"So be it!" she murmured, resigned and defiant, at the mute and smooth
obscurity that hung before her eyes in a black curtain without a
fold; and as if in answer to that whisper a lantern was run up to the
foreyard-arm of the brig. She saw it ascend swinging for a. short space,
and suddenly remain motionless in the air, piercing the dense night
between the two vessels by its glance of flame that strong and steady
seemed, from afar, to fall upon her alone.

Her thoughts, like a fascinated moth, went fluttering toward that
light--that man--that girl, who