There was no one moving in the square.  The trees in the garden looked dim and dreamlike against a red-gold sky.

Suddenly in the next house, from a room with an open window, there rose the sound of a woman’s voice, tender as the night.  It reached the girl who stood waiting in the silence.  The melody was familiar to her, and she leant forward breathlessly to catch the words: 

    Shadows and mist and night,
      Darkness around the way;
    Here a cloud and there a star;
      Afterwards, Day!

There came a pause and the soft notes of a piano.  Nina stood with clasped hands, waiting for the second verse.  Her cheeks were wet.

It came, slow and exquisitely pure, as if an angel had drawn near to the turbulent earth with a message of healing: 

    Sorrow and grief and tears,
      Eyes vainly raised above;
    Here a thorn and there a rose;
      Afterwards, Love!

Nina turned from the open window.  She was groping, for her eyes were full of tears.  From the doorway a man moved quietly to meet her.

“Hereford!” she said in a broken whisper, and went straight into his arms.

He held her fast, so fast that she felt his heart beating against her bowed head.  But it was many seconds before he spoke.

“Do you remember the wishing-gate, Nina?” he said, speaking softly.  “And how you asked for a Deliverer?”

She stretched up her arms to clasp his neck without lifting her head.  She was crying and could not answer him.

He put his hand upon her hair and she felt it tremble.

“Has the Deliverer come to you, dear?” he asked her very tenderly.

He felt for her face in the darkness, and turned it slowly upwards.  She did not resist him though she knew well what was coming.  Rather she yielded to his touch with a sudden, passionate willingness.  And so their lips met in the first kiss that had ever passed between them.

Thus there came a Deliverer more potent than death into the heart of the girl who had married for money, and made its surrender sweet.

The Prey of the Dragon

I

“Ah!  She’s off!”

A deafening blast came from the great steamship’s siren, and a long sigh went up from the crowd upon the quay.  Someone raised a cheer that was quickly drowned in the noise of escaping steam.  Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the vessel began to move.

A black gap appeared, and widened between her and the wharf till it became a stretch of grey water veiled in the dank fog of a murky sea.  The fog was everywhere, floating in wreaths upon the oily swell, blotting out all distant objects, making vague those that were near.  Very soon the crowd on the shore was swallowed up and the great vessel was heading for the mouth, of the harbour and the wide loneliness beyond.