ive limbs piece-meal, and down in the ooze
coils of serpents shall crush them out. Ah God! ah God! I love her so.
Would hell be undesirable if you were there, or heaven perfect if you
were not? O poor soul, poor soul! who will have mercy? Kiss her, mother,
dear; upon her breast lay your hand when she comes. O poor mother, who
had not a little dead body to kiss! Go, go--I cannot bear your eyes. I
want----Ah, ah, the power and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.

He surrendered, and the tide was breast high.

Solitude drifted back, and cleared vision without and within. The
despotism of torture succeeded on the exclusion of throes more virulent.
He prayed for swift death, yet shrank humanly as promise swung hard at
his face. He prayed against Diadyomene, and yet strove with wide eyes to
prevent the darkness, quailing, pulsing at gleam of wave and sweep of
weed. He would give up his soul if it were possible, not for carnal
exchange, but that hers might revive.

Would she of the cold sea nature care greatly for his death? Would she
remember where the outcast body lay, and fulfil her word uttered in scorn
to lay sea-blossoms about the skull? Dead, void of pain, unresponsive to
her touch could he be! O fair, calm life of the sea! O fair, calm
sea-queen! No, no, not for him--death, only death, for him. God's
merciful death.

The enfeebled brain fails again; sense and will flicker out into misty
delirium; from helpless memory a reek distils, and the magic of the sea
is upon him.

Through waves heaving gigantically to isolate him from the world, the
flash and spin of eager life beckoned the blood left in him; great
strengths loomed, his on the loosening of knots of anguish; a roar ran in
his veins, noise and tremor beating through him, fluid to it but for his
bones. Came trampling and singing and clapping, promising welcome to
ineffable glories, ravishing the heart in its anguish to conceive of a
regnant presence in the midst. Coming, coming, with ready hands and lips.
Came a drench, bitter-sweet, enabling speech: like a moan it broke weak,
though at his full expense, 'Diadyomene.' Came she.

Delirium flashes away. Face to face they hang, shattered life and lost
soul. He shudders hard. 'Deliver us from evil,' he mutters, and bows his
head for a fatal breath and escape.

CHAPTER VIII

'Too late. Wait till the tide go down. What was there?'

Hearts quailed at the sound that drove in, for it was not the last voice