“Jealousy is cruel as the grave!—­the coals thereof are coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame!  Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it—­if a man would give all his substance for love it would be utterly contemned!”

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I closed my eyes,—­or thought I closed them—­a vague terror was growing upon me,—­a terror of myself and a still greater terror of the man beside me who held my hand,—­yet something prevented me from turning my head to look at him, and another still stronger emotion possessed me with a force so overpowering that I could hardly breathe under the weight and pain of it, but I could give it no name.  I could not think at all—­and I had ceased even to wonder at the strangeness and variety of these visions or dream-episodes full of colour and sound which succeeded each other so swiftly.  Therefore it hardly seemed remarkable to me when I saw the heavy curtain of mist which hung in front of my eyes suddenly reft asunder in many places and broken into a semblance of the sea.

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A wild sea!  Gloomily grey and grand in its onsweeping wrath, its huge billows rose and fell like moving mountains convulsed by an earthquake,—­light and shadow combated against each other in its dark abysmal depths and among its toppling crests of foam—­I could hear the savage hiss and boom of breakers dashing themselves to pieces on some unseen rocky coast far away,—­and my heart grew cold with dread as I beheld a ship in full sail struggling against the heavy onslaught of the wind on that heaving wilderness of waters, like a mere feather lost from a sea-gull’s wing.  Flying along like a hunted creature she staggered and plunged, her bowsprit dipping into deep chasms from which she was tossed shudderingly upward again as in light contempt, and as she came nearer and nearer into my view I could discern some of the human beings on board—­the man at the wheel, with keen eyes peering into the gathering gloom of the storm, his hair and face dashed with spray,—­the sailors, fighting hard to save the rigging from being torn to pieces and flung into the sea,—­ then—­a sudden huge wave swept her directly in front of me, and I saw the two distinct personalities that had been so constantly presented to me during this strange experience,—­the man with the face of Santoris—­the woman with my own face so truly reflected that I might have been looking at myself in a mirror.  And just now the resemblance to us both was made more close and striking than it had been in any of the previous visions—­that is to say, the likenesses of ourselves were given almost as we now existed.  The man held the woman beside him closely clasped with one arm, supporting her and himself, with the other thrown round one of the shaking masts.  I saw her look up to him with the light of a great and passionate love in her eyes.  And I heard him say:—­