to a more vivid sense of earth
and its realities by the low, melancholy striking of some village clock.
I gazed eagerly along both banks of the river; but although the moon
shone so brightly, neither house nor church nor any sign of human
habitation was visible. When the clock had told its last syllable, the
silence seemed even more profound than before. I might have been
floating on a river that wound through a country never trodden by the
foot of man, so entirely alone, so utterly removed from all human aid,
did I feel myself to be.

I drew the skirt of my frock over my shoulders, for the night air was
beginning to chill me, and contrived to regain the seat I had taken on
first entering the boat. Whither would the river carry me, was the
question I now put to myself. To the sea, doubtless. Had I not been
taught at school that sooner or later all rivers emptied themselves into
the ocean? The immensity of the thought appalled me. It seemed to chill
the beating of my heart; I grew cold from head to foot. Still the boat
held its course steadily, swept onward by the resistless current; still
the willows nodded their fantastic farewells. Along the level meadows
far and wide the white mist lay like a vast winding-sheet; now and then
through the stillness I heard, or seemed to hear, a moan--a mournful
wail, as of some spirit just released from earthly bonds, and forced to
leave its dear ones behind. The moonlight looked cruel, and the water
very, very cold. Someone had told me that death by drowning was swift
and painless. Those stars up there were millions of miles away; how long
would it take my soul, I wondered, to travel that distance--to reach
those glowing orbs--to leave them behind? How glorious such a journey,
beyond all power of thought, to track one's way among the worlds that
flash through space! In the world I should leave there would be one
person only who would mourn for me--Sister Agnes, who would--But what
noise was that?

A noise, low and faint at first, just taking the edge of silence with a
musical murmur that seemed to die out for an instant now and again, then
coming again stronger than before, and so growing by fine degrees louder
and more confirmed, and resolving itself at last into a sound which
could not be mistaken for that of anything but falling water. The sound
was clearly in front of me; I was being swept resistlessly towards it. A
curve of the river and a swelling of the banks hid everything fr