king to mend your shattered life; and for my reward you steal from me
the heart of the one creature in the world I loved--the one--the only
one! Until you came he was mine. Until you came he yearned for me--only
for me. Oh, my heart is broken! broken! broken!" She leaned forward,
wildly sobbing, and raising herself she shook the girl with all her
force, crying: "Out of my sight! Be off! Let me see no more of you!"
Covering her face with her hands, she reeled back, and Karen fled down
the path, hearing a clamour of sobs and outcries behind her.

She fled along the cliff-path and an incomparable horror was in her
soul. Her life had been struck from her. It seemed a ghost that ran,
watched by the moon, among the trees.

On the open cliff-path it was very light. The sky was without a cloud.
The sea lay like a vast cloth of silk, diapered in silver.

Karen ran to where the path led to a rocky verge.

From here, in daylight, one looked down into a vast hollow in the coast
and saw at the bottom, far beneath, a stony beach, always sad, and set
with rocks. To-night the enormous cup was brimmed with blackness.

Karen, pausing and leaning forward, resting on her hands, stared across
the appalling gulf of inky dark, and down into the nothingness.

Horror had driven her to the spot, and horror, like a presence, rose
from the void, and beckoned her down to oblivion. Why not? Why not? The
question of despair seemed, like a vast pendulum, to swing her to and
fro between the sky and the blackness, so that, blind and deaf and dumb,
she felt only the horror, and her own pulse of life suspended over
annihilation. And while her fingers clutched tightly at the rock, the
thought of Gregory's face, as it had loved her, dimly, like a far
beacon, flashed before her. Their love was dead. He did not love her.
But they had loved. She moved back, trembling. She did not want to die.
She lay down with her face to the ground on the grassy cliff.

When she raised herself it was as if after a long slumber. She was
immensely weary, with leaden limbs. Horror was spent; but a dull
oppression urged her up and on. There was something that she must never
see again; something that would open before her again the black abyss of
nothingness; something like the moon, that once had lived, but was now a
ghost, white, ghastly, glittering. She must go. At once. And, as if far
away, a tiny picture rose before her of some little German town, where
she might earn a