sband, and she
braced her courage to strike the blow that should revenge all. The act
to which this fair-haired, once gentle woman was hurrying along the
lonely river-bank, was not in its essence suicide; it was revenge, it
was murder.

When she came to the shabby little house where the boats lay under an
unlovely zinc-roofed shed, she wondered whether she might ask for ink
and paper and write to some one. She longed to send one little word to
Ian; but then what could she say? She could not have seen him and
concealed the truth from him, but it was one of the advantages of her
disappearance that he need never know the dishonor done him. And she
knew he considered suicide a cowardly act. He was quite wrong there. It
was an act of heroic courage to go out like this to meet death. It was
so lonely; even lonelier than death must always be. She had the
conviction that she was not doing wrong, but right. Hers was no common
case. And for the first time she saw that there might be a reason for
this doom which had befallen her. Men regard one sort of weakness as a
sin to be struggled against, another as something harmless, even
amiable, to be acquiesced in. But perhaps all weakness acquiesced in was
a sin in the eyes of Eternal Wisdom, was at any rate to be left to the
mercy of its own consequences. She looked back upon her life and saw
herself never exerting her own judgment, always following in some one
else's tracks, never fighting against her physical, mental, moral
timidity. It was no doubt this weakness of hers that had laid her open
to the mysterious curse which she was now, by a supreme effort of
independent judgment and physical courage, resolved to throw off.

A stupid-looking man in a dirty cotton shirt got out the small boat she
chose; stared a minute in surprise to see the style in which she, an
Oxford girl born and bred, handled the sculls, and then went in again to
continue sleeping off a pint of beer.

She pulled on mechanically, with a long, regular stroke, and one by one
scenes, happy river-scenes out of past years, came back to her with
wonderful vividness. Looking about her she saw an osier-bed dividing
the stream, and beside it the opening into the willow-shaded backwater
which she remembered. She turned the boat's head into it. Heavy clouds
had rolled up and covered the sky, and there was a kind of twilight
between the dark water and the netted boughs overhead. Very soon she
heard the noise of a weir. On