After the scene just passed, it seemed to the girl impossible, ludicrous, to suppose that Stephen loved her.

She had already made great allowance for him.  She had a large share of the gift of her sex—­intuition; and she had understood more than many women would have done, but to-night he had gone beyond the limits of her imagination.

“No man would be so intensely unkind to a woman he cared for,” she argued.  “For nothing, when there is no need.”

She was not an unreasonable, nor selfish, nor silly girl.  Had Stephen told her he loved her, but that they must suppress their passion, that she must wait, she would have obeyed him, and waited months, years, gone down to her grave waiting, in patient fidelity to him.  Her qualities of control were as fine as his, and her devotion to a man who loved her would have been limitless, but, acting according to his views, Stephen had taken some trouble to convince her he was not the man, and she was convinced.

And being convinced, the vision of her life without him seemed just then a dismal waste, impossible to face.

In most of the actions of the human being, the physical state of the person at the time is the principal factor, and May’s whole physical frame, violently over-strained, craved for rest—­rest that the excited brain could not give.  Rest was the urgent demand pressed by the breaking nervous system, and from these two thoughts—­rest, oblivion—­grew the dangerous thought of Death.

“Sleep and forget! but I can’t,” she thought, “and if I do, there is the horrible awakening;” and again her fatigue suggested all the past sleepless nights, and the craving of the body urged the brain to find better means of satisfying it, in the same way as the appetite for food forces the brain to devise methods for procuring it.

She walked on in a straight line from Stephen’s house, and the road happened to pass a post-office.  May stopped and looked absently through its lighted, notice-covered panes.

“Send him a few lines,” she thought; “because I am so stupid, I could not tell him enough, and then—­”

She did not finish the sentence, but all beyond was blank peace.  She went in, bought a letter-card, and wrote:—­

“I could have loved you devotedly, intensely, had you wished it, but you have made it clear to-night that you do not want love—­at any rate, not mine.  I have discovered that I have courage enough to die, but not to live without you.  I am going to the sea now, and in an hour we shall be separated for ever.  I shall know nothing and you will care nothing, so it seems a good arrangement.  My last thought will be of you, my last desire for you, my last breath your name.”

She fastened it with an untrembling hand, passed out of the office, posted it, and went straight down a side street to the parade.

The night was still, bound in a frosty silence.  The temperature sank momentarily, and the icy grip intensified in the air.  Overhead the sky was black, and glittered coldly with the winter stars.  Beside and behind her and before her not a living creature’s footstep broke the silence.  The sea lay smooth, black, and motionless on her left, like some huge sleeping monster.