e that curled through him deliciously by
wavering; but I think I may blush at recollections, and I would rather
have you absent. Adieu! I will not ask for obedience from you beyond
to-night. Your word?'

He gave it in a stupor of felicity, and she fled.

CHAPTER IX

Chloe drew the silken string from her bosom, as she descended the dim
pathway through the furies, and set her fingers travelling along it for
the number of the knots. 'I have no right to be living,' she said. Seven
was the number; seven years she had awaited her lover's return; she
counted her age and completed it in sevens. Fatalism had sustained her
during her lover's absence; it had fast hold of her now. Thereby had
she been enabled to say, 'He will come'; and saying, 'He has come,'
her touch rested on the first knot in the string. She had no power
to displace her fingers, and the cause of the tying of the knot stood
across her brain marked in dull red characters, legible neither to her
eye nor to her understanding, but a reviving of the hour that brought it
on her spirit with human distinctness, except of the light of day: she
had a sense of having forfeited light, and seeing perhaps more clearly.
Everything assured her that she saw more clearly than others; she saw
too when it was good to cease to live.

Hers was the unhappy lot of one gifted with poet-imagination to throb
with the woman supplanting her and share the fascination of the man who
deceived. At their first meeting, in her presence, she had seen that
they were not strangers; she pitied them for speaking falsely, and when
she vowed to thwart this course of evil it to save a younger creature of
her sex, not in rivalry. She treated them both with a proud generosity
surpassing gentleness. All that there was of selfishness in her bosom
resolved to the enjoyment of her one month of strongly willed delusion.

The kiss she had sunk to robbed no one, not even her body's purity, for
when this knot was tied she consigned herself to her end, and had become
a bag of dust. The other knots in the string pointed to verifications;
this first one was a suspicion, and it was the more precious, she felt
it to be more a certainty; it had come from the dark world beyond us,
where all is known. Her belief that it had come thence was nourished
by testimony, the space of blackness wherein she had lived since,
exhausting her last vitality in a simulation of infantile happiness,
which was nothing other than