After a time this absolute silence which she almost could feel pressing upon her on all sides induced in Mrs. Travers a state of hallucination.  She saw herself standing alone, at the end of time, on the brink of days.  All was unmoving as if the dawn would never come, the stars would never fade, the sun would never rise any more; all was mute, still, dead—­as if the shadow of the outer darkness, the shadow of the uninterrupted, of the everlasting night that fills the universe, the shadow of the night so profound and so vast that the blazing suns lost in it are only like sparks, like pin-points of fire, the restless shadow that like a suspicion of an evil truth darkens everything upon the earth on its passage, had enveloped her, had stood arrested as if to remain with her forever.

And there was such a finality in that illusion, such an accord with the trend of her thought that when she murmured into the darkness a faint “so be it” she seemed to have spoken one of those sentences that resume and close a life.

As a young girl, often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal fulfilment and the only truth of life.  Entering the world she discovered that ideal to be unattainable because the world is too prudent to be sincere.  Then she hoped that she could find the truth of life an ambition which she understood as a lifelong devotion to some unselfish ideal.  Mr. Travers’ name was on men’s lips; he seemed capable of enthusiasm and of devotion; he impressed her imagination by his impenetrability.  She married him, found him enthusiastically devoted to the nursing of his own career, and had nothing to hope for now.

That her husband should be bewildered by the curious misunderstanding which had taken place and also permanently grieved by her disloyalty to his respectable ideals was only natural.  He was, however, perfectly satisfied with her beauty, her brilliance, and her useful connections.  She was admired, she was envied; she was surrounded by splendour and adulation; the days went on rapid, brilliant, uniform, without a glimpse of sincerity or true passion, without a single true emotion—­not even that of a great sorrow.  And swiftly and stealthily they had led her on and on, to this evening, to this coast, to this sea, to this moment of time and to this spot on the earth’s surface where she felt unerringly that the moving shadow of the unbroken night had stood still to remain with her forever.

“So be it!” she murmured, resigned and defiant, at the mute and smooth obscurity that hung before her eyes in a black curtain without a fold; and as if in answer to that whisper a lantern was run up to the foreyard-arm of the brig.  She saw it ascend swinging for a. short space, and suddenly remain motionless in the air, piercing the dense night between the two vessels by its glance of flame that strong and steady seemed, from afar, to fall upon her alone.