She walked on rapidly:  a glorious, vigorous, living, youthful figure, full of that tremendous activity of brain and pulse and blood, so valuable when there is a use for it, so dangerous when thrown back upon itself.

“How I could have loved him, worshipped him, lived for him, had he but wanted me!” is the one instinctive cry of her whole nature.

At the first easy descent to the beach she turns from the parade, and goes down, passing without hesitation from the light down to the moist darkness of the beach.  To get away into oblivion, to escape from this maddening sense of pain, to lose it, let it go from her like a garment in the black water, is her only impelling instinct.

She sees the glimmer of the water before her without a shudder.  How much dearer and more inviting it seems to her tired eyes than her bed at home, where so many, many sleepless, anguished nights have been spent!  Here—­rest and sleep, with no awakening to a grey and barren to-morrow.  The thought of Death is lost.  Desire for the cessation of pain is keener at its height than even the desire for life.

She stumbles on the wet, black beach at the water’s edge, and then finds where it is slipping like oil over the sand.

She walks forward, and the chill of the water rises round her ankles, then her knees, then her waist, and then she throws herself face forwards on it, as she once thought to fling herself on his breast.

In a half-drunken satisfaction she stretches her arms out in it and commences to swim towards the horizon.  “Like his arms!” she thinks, as the water encircles her.  “Like his lips!” she thinks, as it presses on her throat.  “And as cold as his nature.”

* * * * *

The following morning is calm and still—­a perfect specimen of wintry beauty.  A light frost covers the ground and sparkles on the trees.

There is a faint chill in the clear air, a tranquil calm on the gently rising and falling sea and in the lucid sky.

The sunlight falling on Stephen’s bed and across his sleeping face shows a smile there, and his arm, lying on the coverlet—­an arm thinned by constant fever and night-sweats—­rests, in his thoughts, round her neck; that white neck so sweetly familiar in his dreams.

After a time he wakes and yawns, and turns his head heavily towards the window; and farther as the happy unconsciousness of sleep recedes from his face, and recollection and intelligence come back to it, more clearly show the haggard lines, traced all over it, of self-repression, seaming and marking it at five-and-twenty.

“Another day to be got through,” he thinks merely, as Nature’s most precious gift—­the light—­pours glowing through the panes.

When half-an-hour later he opens his door to take in his boots, he finds two letters with them, and at the sight of one his heart beats hard.

The other is in the girl’s handwriting, and he lays it on his toilet-table, with the thought, “Asking me to go and see her, I suppose,” and turns to the other with a mad impatience.