t
nervous restlessness of the fingers? And why was he so bitter against
Montanelli? Five years--five years------

If she could but know that he was drowned--if she could but have seen
the body; some day, surely, the old wound would have left off aching,
the old memory would have lost its terrors. Perhaps in another twenty
years she would have learned to look back without shrinking.

All her youth had been poisoned by the thought of what she had done.
Resolutely, day after day and year after year, she had fought against
the demon of remorse. Always she had remembered that her work lay in the
future; always had shut her eyes and ears to the haunting spectre of the
past. And day after day, year after year, the image of the drowned body
drifting out to sea had never left her, and the bitter cry that she
could not silence had risen in her heart: "I have killed Arthur! Arthur
is dead!" Sometimes it had seemed to her that her burden was too heavy
to be borne.

Now she would have given half her life to have that burden back again.
If she had killed him--that was a familiar grief; she had endured it too
long to sink under it now. But if she had driven him, not into the water
but into------ She sat down, covering her eyes with both hands. And her
life had been darkened for his sake, because he was dead! If she had
brought upon him nothing worse than death----

Steadily, pitilessly she went back, step by step, through the hell of
his past life. It was as vivid to her as though she had seen and felt
it all; the helpless shivering of the naked soul, the mockery that
was bitterer than death, the horror of loneliness, the slow, grinding,
relentless agony. It was as vivid as if she had sat beside him in the
filthy Indian hut; as if she had suffered with him in the silver-mines,
the coffee fields, the horrible variety show--

The variety show---- No, she must shut out that image, at least; it was
enough to drive one mad to sit and think of it.

She opened a little drawer in her writing-desk. It contained the few
personal relics which she could not bring herself to destroy. She
was not given to the hoarding up of sentimental trifles; and the
preservation of these keepsakes was a concession to that weaker side of
her nature which she kept under with so steady a hand. She very seldom
allowed herself to look at them.

Now she took them out, one after another: Giovanni's first letter to
her, and the flowers that had lain in his dead