or some other
power, would do her the blessing to show her by second-sight her
beloved! either living and working hard to return a rich man, or else
as a corpse surrendered by the sea, so that she might at least know a
certainty.

Sometimes she was seized with the thought of a ship appearing suddenly
upon the horizon: the _Leopoldine_ hastening home. Then she would
suddenly make an instinctive movement to rise, and rush to look out at
the ocean, to see whether it were true.

But she would fall back. Alas! where was this _Leopoldine_ now? Where
could she be? Out afar, at that awful distance of Iceland,--forsaken,
crushed, and lost.

All ended by a never-fading vision appearing to her,--an empty,
sea-tossed wreck, slowly and gently rocked by the silent gray and
rose-streaked sea; almost with soft mockery, in the midst of the vast
calm of deadened waters.

Two o'clock in the morning.

It was at night especially that she kept attentive to approaching
footsteps; at the slightest rumor or unaccustomed noise her temples
vibrated: by dint of being strained to outward things, they had become
fearfully sensitive.

Two o'clock in the morning. On this night as on others, with her hands
clasped and her eyes wide open in the dark, she listened to the wind
sweeping in never-ending tumult over the heath.

Suddenly a man's footsteps hurried along the path! At this hour who
would pass now? She drew herself up, stirred to the very soul, her
heart ceasing to beat.

Some one stopped before the door, and came up the small stone steps.

He!--O God!--he! Some one had knocked,--it could be no other than he!
She was up now, barefooted; she, so feeble for the last few days, had
sprung up as nimbly as a kitten, with her arms outstretched to wind
round her darling. Of course the _Leopoldine_ had arrived at night,
and anchored in Pors-Even Bay, and he had rushed home; she arranged all
this in her mind with the swiftness of lightning. She tore the flesh
off her fingers in her excitement to draw the bolt, which had stuck.

"Eh?"

She slowly moved backward, as if crushed, her head falling on her
bosom. Her beautiful insane dream was over. She could just grasp that
it was not her husband, her Yann, and that nothing of him, substantial
or spiritual, had passed through the air; she felt plunged again into
her deep abyss, to the lowest depths of her terrible despair.

Poor Fantec--for it was he--stammered many excuses: his wife