ulse and
blood, so valuable when there is a use for it, so dangerous when
thrown back upon itself.

"How I could have loved him, worshipped him, lived for him, had he
but wanted me!" is the one instinctive cry of her whole nature.

At the first easy descent to the beach she turns from the parade,
and goes down, passing without hesitation from the light down to
the moist darkness of the beach. To get away into oblivion, to
escape from this maddening sense of pain, to lose it, let it go
from her like a garment in the black water, is her only impelling
instinct.

She sees the glimmer of the water before her without a shudder. How
much dearer and more inviting it seems to her tired eyes than her
bed at home, where so many, many sleepless, anguished nights have
been spent! Here--rest and sleep, with no awakening to a grey and
barren to-morrow. The thought of Death is lost. Desire for the
cessation of pain is keener at its height than even the desire for
life.

She stumbles on the wet, black beach at the water's edge, and then
finds where it is slipping like oil over the sand.

She walks forward, and the chill of the water rises round her
ankles, then her knees, then her waist, and then she throws herself
face forwards on it, as she once thought to fling herself on his
breast.

In a half-drunken satisfaction she stretches her arms out in it and
commences to swim towards the horizon. "Like his arms!" she thinks,
as the water encircles her. "Like his lips!" she thinks, as it
presses on her throat. "And as cold as his nature."

* * * * *

The following morning is calm and still--a perfect specimen of
wintry beauty. A light frost covers the ground and sparkles on the
trees.

There is a faint chill in the clear air, a tranquil calm on the
gently rising and falling sea and in the lucid sky.

The sunlight falling on Stephen's bed and across his sleeping face
shows a smile there, and his arm, lying on the coverlet--an arm
thinned by constant fever and night-sweats--rests, in his thoughts,
round her neck; that white neck so sweetly familiar in his dreams.

After a time he wakes and yawns, and turns his head heavily towards
the window; and farther as the happy unconsciousness of sleep
recedes from his face, and recollection and intelligence come back
to it, more clearly show the haggard lines, traced all over it, of
self-repression, seaming and marking it at five-and-twenty.

"Another da