e--even to the
tapering fingers laid lightly on the railing--as five minutes before she
had dreamed over a land of promise. He, looking down on her white
face--whiter in the silver powder of the moonlight--saw a look of utter,
hopeless quiet settle there--such quiet as one sees in an unclosed
coffin, such marble, impassive calm, neither reproachful nor grieving,
as covers deadly wounds--settle never again to rise till Death shall
sweep it off. Some lives are stamped at once and forever; and faces
gather in an hour the look that haunts them for a lifetime.

Then he knew that no one ever bears the consequences of a sin alone. On
this woman, for whom he would have gone to death, he had drawn down the
curse. He was powerless to help her; all that he could give--the promise
of lifelong love and tenderness--was itself a deadly wrong--would blast
his life in giving, hers in receiving. In the minutes that he stood
there, gazing into her face, all the waves and billows of bitterest
realization of helplessness went over his heart.

She turned to go away. 'Marguerite!' The man's despairing soul, his
bitter struggles and failures, atoned for in this last agony, made
itself utterance in that one cry. She turned back, without looking up;
even his eager gaze could not force up the heavy lids. Then, with that
sweet, miraculous woman's grace of patience and pity, she put out her
hand, and as he bowed his head over it, touched her lips to his cheek
with quick, light contact, and glided away.

Earliest morning shimmered lances of gray, ghostly light on the horizon,
and across the sea to the waiting shore. They struck grayest and
ghostliest on a high balcony, where a woman's figure crouched, swathed
in damp, trailing drapery, with silky, falling hair about a still face,
and steadfast eyes that had burned just as steadfastly through the long
hours gone by. Great, calm stars, circling slowly, had slipped out of
sight into the waves; the restless, grieving ocean had swayed all night
with heavy beat against the beach; mysterious whisperings had stirred
the broad summer leaves, heavy with dew and moonlight; faint night
noises had drifted up to her, leaving the silence unrippled by an echo;
till the old moon dropped a wasted, blood-red crescent out of sight, and
the world, exhausted with the passion of the yearning night, shrouded
itself in the gloom and quiet that comes before the dawn.

To the watcher, who, with strained, unconscious attent