nt of her own feebleness; but Nature was the great
Incomprehensible--and she was alone with it. Alone, in a lonely land,
peopled mostly by the wild creatures of sea and shore, by peasants and
fishermen, men and women who looked at her with strange eyes and spoke a
strange language; whose ways were dark to her, and their thoughts
unfathomable. She was face to face not only with primitive human beings,
but with the primeval forces of the world--the stern, implacable will of
the wind and sea. Not that she could feel these things thus, for they
lay beyond the range of her emotions; but at the same time they tortured
her. At first it was only by a dull sense of their presence,
annihilating her own. Then, because they were things too great for her
to grasp, they cruelly flung her back upon herself. They had no
revelation for her. But left to herself, bit by bit her own character
was revealed to her,--not as it had appeared to her before--not even as
Wyndham had revealed it to her--but in the nothingness that was its
being. It was stripped bare of all that had clothed it, and ruled it,
and made it seem beautiful in her eyes. Left to herself, all the
influences that had lent colour and consistency to this blank, unstable
nature, had passed out of her life. The men whose destiny she had tried
to mould, who had ended by moulding hers, twisting it now into one
shape, now into another, had done with it at last; they had flung it
from them unshapen as before. There was no permanence even in destiny.
Vincent, whose will had dominated her own; Ted, whose boyish passion had
touched her heart and made her feel; Langley, whose intellect had
kindled hers, and made her able to think,--they were all gone, and she
was alone. That was Langley's doing--Langley, whom alone of the three
she had really loved--ah, she hated him for it now. And hating him, she
remembered the many virtues of the two whom she had not loved well.
Vincent--that was a revelation of love--why had she shut her eyes to it?
Ted too, poor boy, he might have been hers still if she had chosen. She
might have been moulding his destiny at this moment--instead of which,
his destiny was doubtless moulding itself admirably without her.

Then her mood changed. She revolted against the cruelty of her lot. Her
sex was the original, the unpardonable injustice. If she had only been a
man, she could have taken her life into her own hands, and shaped it
according to her will. But woman, ev