Estenega, being a man of the world and having consequently outgrown the cynicism of youth, also knowing women better than this fair Minerva would know them in twenty lifetimes, thought differently, and a battle ensued.

Natalie, meanwhile, wandered along the cliffs.  She passed the town hurriedly.  Several times when in its vicinity before, the magnetism of an intense gaze had given her a thrill of alarm, and once or twice she had met face to face the miller’s son—­a forbidding youth with the skull of the Tartar and the coarse black hair and furtive eyes of the Indian—­whose admiration of her beauty had been annoyingly apparent.  She was not conscious of observation to-day, however, and skirted the cliffs rapidly, drawing her gray mantle about her as the wind howled by, but did not lift the hood; the massive coils of silver-blond hair kept her head warm.

As the Princess Helene, despite her own faultless blondinity, had pronounced, Natalie Ivanhoff was a beautiful woman.  Her profile had the delicate effect produced by the chisel.  Her white skin was transparent and untinted, but the mouth was scarlet.  The large long eyes of a changeful blue-gray, although limpid of surface, were heavy with the sadness of a sad spirit.  Their natural fire was quenched just as the slight compression of her lips had lessened the sensuous fulness of their curves.

But she had suffered so bitterly and so variously that the points had been broken off her nerves, she told herself, and, excepting when her trouble mounted suddenly like a wave within her, her mind was tranquil.  Grief with her had expressed itself in all its forms.  She had known what it was to be crushed into semi-insensibility; she had thrilled as the tears rushed and the sobs shook her until every nerve ached and her very fingers cramped; and she had gone wild at other times, burying her head, that her screams might not be heard:  the last, as imagination pictured her lover’s certain physical suffering.  But of all agonies, none could approximate to that induced by Death.  When that rumour reached her, she realized that hope had given her some measure of support, and how insignificant all other trouble is beside that awful blank, that mystery, whose single revelation is the houseless soul’s unreturning flight from the only world we are sure of.  When the contradicting rumour came, she clutched at hope and clung to it.

“It is the only reason I do not kill myself,” she thought, as she stood on the jutting brow of the cliff and looked down on the masses of huge stones which, with the gaunt outlying rocks, had once hung on the face of the crags.  The great breakers boiled over them with the ponderosity peculiar to the waters of the Pacific.  The least of those breakers would carry her far into the hospitable ocean.

“It is so easy to die and be at peace; the only thing which makes life supportable is the knowledge of Death’s quick obedience.  And the tragedy of life is not that we cannot forget, but that we can.  Think of being an old woman with not so much as a connecting current between the memory and the heart, the long interval blocked with ten thousand petty events and trials!  It must be worse than this.  I shall have gone over the cliff long before that time comes.  I would go to-day, but I cannot leave the world while he is in it.”