would not save her for another that in his cruel love he preferred to
know her dead, beneath the cold waters, rather than the living, happy
wife of another man? Or was it that in the sudden shock and terror he
never thought of trying to save her?

He stood for hours--it seemed to him as years--watching the spot where
the pale, agonized face had vanished--watching the eddying ripples and
the green reeds. Yet he never sought to save her--never plunged into
the deep waters whence he might have rescued her had he wished. He
never moved. He felt no fatigue. The first thing that roused him was a
gleam of gray light in the eastern sky, and the sweet, faint song of a
little bird.

Then he saw that the day had broken. He said to himself, with a wild
horrible laugh, that he had watched all night by her grave.

He turned and fled. One meeting him, with fierce, wild eyes full of
the fire of madness, with pale, haggard face full of despair, would
have shunned him. He fled through the green park, out on the
high-road, away through the deep woods--he knew not whither never
looking back; crying out at times, with a hollow, awful voice that he
had been all night by her grave; falling at times on his face with
wild, woeful weeping, praying the heavens to fall upon him and hide him
forever from his fellow men.

He crept into a field where the hedge-rows were bright with autumn's
tints. He threw himself down, and tried to close his hot, dazed eyes,
but the sky above him looked blood-red, the air seemed filled with
flames. Turn where he would, the pale, despairing face that had looked
up to him as the waters opened was before him. He arose with a great
cry, and wandered on. He came to a little cottage, where rosy children
were at play, talking and laughing in the bright sunshine.

Great Heaven! How long was it since the dead girl, now sleeping under
the deep waters, was happy and bright as they?

He fled again. This time the piercing cry filled his ears; it seemed
to deaden his brain. He fell in the field near the cottage. Hours
afterward the children out at play found him lying in the dank grass
that fringed the pond under the alder trees.

* * * * *

The first faint flush of dawn, a rosy light, broke in the eastern sky,
a tremulous, golden shimmer was on the lake as the sunbeams touched it.
The forest birds awoke and began to sing; they flew from branch to
branch; the flowers began to open