“Oh, yes,” she said at length, “I do admit it.  You must forgive me, Kate.  It seems so easy for you two to be happy that I can’t help feeling it blasphemous for you to be anything else.  If it were an ordinary marriage or an ordinary separation, I shouldn’t feel so agonized over it.  But you and Karl—­such mates—­the only free spirits I know!  How you would love!  It would be epic.  And I should rejoice that you were living in that savage world instead of in a city.  You two would need room—­like great beautiful buildings.  Who would wish to see you in the jumble of a city?  With you to aid him, Karl may become a distinguished man.  Your lives would go on together, widening, widening—­”

“Oh!” interrupted Kate with a sharp ejaculation; “we’ll not talk of it any more, Honora.  You must not think because I cannot marry him that he will always be unhappy.  In time he will find another woman—­”

“Kate!  Will you find another man?”

“You know I shall not!  After Wander?  Any man would be an anticlimax to me after him.”

“Can you suspect him of a passion or a fealty less than your own?  If you refuse to marry him, I believe you will frustrate a great purpose of Nature.  Why, Kate, it will be a crime against Love.  The thought as I feel it means more—­oh, infinitely more—­than I can make the words convey to you; but you must think them over, Kate,—­I beg you to think them over!”

In the darkness, Kate heard Honora stealing away to her room.

So she was alone, and the hour had come for her decision.

“‘Bitter, alas,’” she quoted to the rising trouble of the sea, ’"the sorrow of lonely women.’” The distillation of that strange duplex soul, Fiona Macleod, was as a drop of poisoned truth upon her parched tongue.

     “We who love are those who suffer;
     We who suffer most are those who most do love.”

She went down upon the sands.  The tongues of the sea came up and lapped her feet.  The winds of the sea enfolded her in an embrace.  For the first time in her life, freely, without restraint, bravely, as sometime she might face God, she confronted the idea of Love.  And a secret, wonderful knowledge came to her—­the knowledge of lovely spiritual ecstasies, the realization of rich human delights.  Sorrow and cruel loss might be on their way, but Joy was hers now.  She feigned that Karl was waiting for her a little way on in the warm darkness—­on, around that scimitar-shaped bend of the beach.  She chose to believe that he was running to meet her, his eyes aflame, his great arms outstretched; she thrilled to the rain of his kisses; she thought those stars might hear the voice with which he shouted, “Kate!”

Then, calmer, yet as if she had run a race, panting, palpitant, she seated herself on the sands.  She let her imagination roam through the years.  She saw the road of life they would take together; how they would stand on peaks of lofty desire, in sunlight; how, unfaltering, they would pace tenebrous valleys.  Always they would be together.  Their laughter would chime and their tears would fall in unison.  Where one failed, the other would redeem; where one doubted, the other would hope.  They would bear their children to be the vehicle of their ideals—­these fresh new creatures, born of their love, would be trained to achieve what they, their parents, had somehow missed.