rs, where they appeared to be looking
down at him stern and questioning, a guilty shame over the wrong he was
doing their child smote him sorely: he saw that he had allowed the one
instant of choice to slip away; the sense came over him that he had sealed
his own doom, while a vision of Louie's face, full of desolation and
horror, was scorching in upon his soul; and there, in the moment of
betrothal, his punishment began. He stole down to the Sabrina's wharf that
evening, after the moon had set, and looking round to see that it was
quite forsaken at that hour, he took from his neck a long, slender
hair-chain to drop over into the deep water there; but as he held the
thing it seemed suddenly to coil round his hand with a caress, as if it
were still a part of Louie's self. He stamped his foot and ground his heel
into the earth there with a cry and an oath, and put the chain back again
whence he had taken it, and swore he would wear it till they laid his
bones under ground. And he looked up at the dark lines of the brig looming
like the black skeleton of an evil thing against the darkness of the
night, and he cursed himself for a traitor to both women--for a hypocrite,
a craven, a man sold to the highest bidder. Well, well, Captain Traverse,
there are curses that cling! And Louie sat in the gloom at the window of
the fisherman's cottage down below the town, and sighed and wondered and
longed and waited, but Captain Traverse went back to the Maurices'
mansion.

* * * * *

It is one of the enigmas of this existence how women forgive the wrong of
such hours as came to Louie now--hours of suspense and suffering--hours of
a misery worse than the worm's misery in blindness and pain before it
finds its wings.

At first she expected her lover, and speculated as to his delay, and
fretted to think anything might detain him from her; and now she was
amazed, and now vexed, and now she was forgiving the neglect, accusing
herself and making countless excuses for him; and now imagining a thousand
dire mishaps. But as the third day came and he was still away--he who had
been always wont to seek her as soon as the craft was made fast to
wharf--then she felt her worst forebodings taking bodily shape: he was
ill, he had fallen overboard, he had left the vessel at Liverpool and
shipped upon another, and a letter would come directly to say so; or else
he had been waylaid and robbed and made away with: not once