Sometimes she paused at the window to stare down into the busy thoroughfare below, but she never paused for long.  The fever that consumed her gave her no rest, and again she was pacing to and fro, to and fro, eternally, counting the leaden minutes that crept by so slowly.

At last, when flesh and blood could endure no longer, she snatched up her hat and veil, and prepared to go on board.  Standing before a mirror, she began to adjust these with trembling fingers, but suddenly stopped dead, gazing speechlessly before her.  For her own eyes had inadvertently met the eyes of the haggard woman in the glass, and dumbly, with a new horror clutching at her heart, she stared into their wild depths and read as in a book the tale of torture that they held.

When she turned away at length, she was shivering from head to foot as though she had seen a spectre; and so in truth she had.  For those eyes had told her what she had not otherwise begun to realise.

That which she had believed dead for so long had been, only dormant, and had sprung to sudden, burning life.  The weapon with which she had thought to pierce her enemy had turned in her grasp and pierced her also, pierced her with an agony unspeakable—­ay, pierced her to the heart.

X

As one in a dream she stood on deck and watched India slipping below the horizon.  Her restlessness was subsiding at last.  She was conscious of an intense weariness, greater than any she had ever known.  As soon as that distant line of land had disappeared she told herself that she would go and rest.  Her fellow passengers had for the most part settled down.  They sat about in groups under the awning.  A few, like herself, stood at the rail and gazed astern, but there was no one very near her.  She felt as if she stood utterly alone in all the world.

Slowly at last she turned away.  Slowly she crossed the deck and began to descend the companion.  A knot of people stood talking at the foot.  They made way for her to pass.  She went through them without a glance.  She scarcely even saw them.

She went to her cabin and lay down, but she knew at once that sleep would not come to her.  Her eyes burned as though weighted with many scalding tears, but she could not weep.  She could only lie staring vaguely before her, and dumbly endure that suffering which she had vainly fancied could never again be her portion.  She could only strive—­and strive in vain—­to shut out the vision of the man she loved standing alone at the altar waiting for the woman who had played him false.

The dinner hour approached.  Mechanically she rose and dressed.  She did not shrink from meeting the eyes of strangers.  They simply did not exist for her.  She took her place in the great dining saloon, looking neither to right nor left.  The buzz of conversation all around her passed her by.  She might have been sitting in utter solitude.  And all the while the misery gnawed ever deeper into her heart.