He put his hands to his face and groaned aloud.

“You are right,” he said.  “I would rather have known her dead than know her as she is.  But there is no reason why I should bore you with all this.”

“Arthur, you are nothing if not considerate, and I do not pretend that this is a very pleasant conversation for me; but I began it, so I suppose I must endure to see you groaning for another woman.  You say,” she went on, with a sudden flash of passion, “that you should like to see her dead.  I say that I should like to kill her, for she has struck me a double blow—­she has injured you whom I love, and she has beggared me of your affection.  Oh!  Arthur,” she continued, changing her voice and throwing a caressing arm about his neck, “have you no heart left to give me? is there no lingering spark that I can cherish and blow to flame?  I will never treat you so, dear.  Learn to love me, and I will marry you and make you happy, make you forget this faithless woman with the angel face.  I will——­” here her voice broke down in sobs, and in the starlight the great tears glistened upon her coral-tinted face like dew-drops on a pomegranate’s blushing rind.

“There, there, dear, I will try to forget; don’t cry,” and he touched her on the forehead with his lips.

She stopped, and then said, with just the faintest tinge of bitterness in her voice:  “If it had been Angela who cried, you would not be so cold, you would have kissed away her tears.”

Who can say what hidden chord of feeling those words touched, or what memories they awoke? but their effect upon Arthur was striking.  He sprang up upon the deck, his eyes blazing, and his face white with anger.

“How often,” he said, “must I forbid you to mention the name of that woman to me?  Do you take a pleasure in torturing me?  Curse her, may she eat out her empty heart in solitude, and find no living thing to comfort her!  May she suffer as she makes me suffer, till her life becomes a hell——­”

“Be quiet, Arthur, it is shameful to say such things.”

He stopped, and after the sharp ring of his voice, that echoed like the cry wrung from a person in intense pain, the loneliness and quiet of the night were very deep.  And then an answer came to his mad, unmanly imprecations.  For suddenly the air round them was filled with the sound of his own name uttered in such wild, despairing accents as, once heard, were not likely to be forgotten, accents which seemed to be around them and over them, and heard in their own brains, and yet to come travelling from immeasurable distances across the waste of waters.

“Arthur!  Arthur!”

The sound that had sprung from nothing died away into nothingness again, and the moonlight glanced, and the waters heaved, and gave no sign of the place of its birth.  It had come and gone, awful, untraceable, and in the place of its solemnity reigned silence absolute.