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For days she lay in her bed.  She had no desire to arise.  She seemed to dread interruption to her passionate drama of emotion, in which sorrow and joy were combined in indeterminate parts.  From her window she could see the snow-capped peaks of the Williston range, rising with immortal and changeful beauty into the purple heavens.  As she watched them with incurious eyes, marking them in the first light of the day, when their iridescence made them seem as impalpable as a dream of heaven; eyeing them in the noon-height, when their sides were the hue of ruddy granite; watching them at sunset when they faded from swimming gold to rose, from rose to purple, they seemed less like mountains than like those fair and fatal bergs of the Northern Atlantic.  She had read of them, though she had not seen them.  She knew how they sloughed from the inexhaustible ice-cap of Greenland’s bleak continent and marched, stately as an army, down the mighty plain of the ocean.  Fair beyond word were they, with jeweled crevasses and mother-of-pearl changefulness, indomitable, treacherous, menacing.  Honora, closing weary eyes, still saw them sailing, sailing, white as angels, radiant as dawn, changing, changing, lovely and cold as death.

Mind and gaze were fixed upon their enchantment.  She would not think of certain other things—­of that incredible catastrophe, that rent ship, crashing to its doom, of that vast company tossed upon the sea, of those cries in the dark.  No, she shut her eyes and her ears to those things!  They seemed to be the servitors at the doors of madness, and she let them crook their fingers at her in vain.  Now and then, when she was not on guard, they swarmed upon her, whispering stories of black struggle, of heart-breaking separation of mother and child, of husband and wife.  Sometimes they told her how Mary—­so luxurious, so smiling, so avid of warmth and food and kisses—­had shivered in that bleak wind, as she sat coatless, torn from David’s sheltering embrace.  They had given her elfish reminders of how soft, how pink, how perfumed was that woman’s tender flesh.  Then as she looked the blue eyes glazed with agony, the supple body grew rigid with cold, and down, down, through miles of water, sank the man they both had loved.

No, no, it was better to watch the bergs, those glistering, fair, white ships of death!  Yes, there from the window she seemed to see them!  How the sun glorified them!  Was the sun setting, then?  Had there been another day?

“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow—­”

Darkness was falling.  But even in the darkness she saw the ice-ships slipping down from that great frozen waste, along the glacial rivers, past the bleak lisiere, into the bitter sea, and on down, down to meet that other ship—­that ship bearing its mighty burden of living men—­and to break it in unequal combat.

Oh, could she never sleep!  Would those white ships never reach port!