ft at the end, she hurriedly turned back and
began it over again.

One o'clock struck from the church clock, and still the captain never
appeared.

She read the letter for the second time; she turned back obstinately,
despairingly, and began it for the third time. As she once more reached
the last page, she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to two. She
had just put the watch back in the belt of her dress, when there came to
her--far off in the stillness of the morning--a sound of wheels.

She dropped the letter and clasped her cold hands in her lap and
listened. The sound came on, faster and faster, nearer and nearer--the
trivial sound to all other ears; the sound of Doom to hers. It passed
the side of the house; it traveled a little further on; it stopped. She
heard a loud knocking--then the opening of a window--then voices--then a
long silence--than the wheels again coming back--then the opening of the
door below, and the sound of the captain's voice in the passage.

She could endure it no longer. She opened her door a little way and
called to him.

He ran upstairs instantly, astonish ed that she was not in bed. She
spoke to him through the narrow opening of the door, keeping herself
hidden behind it, for she was afraid to let him see her face.

"Has anything gone wrong?" she asked.

"Make your mind easy," he answered. "Nothing has gone wrong."

"Is no accident likely to happen between this and Monday?"

"None whatever. The marriage is a certainty."

"A certainty?"

"Yes."

"Good-night."

She put her hand out through the door. He took it with some little
surprise; it was not often in his experience that she gave him her hand
of her own accord.

"You have sat up too long," he said, as he felt the clasp of her cold
fingers. "I am afraid you will have a bad night--I'm afraid you will not
sleep."

She softly closed the door.

"I shall sleep," she said, "sounder than you think for."

It was past two o'clock when she shut herself up alone in her room. Her
chair stood in its customary place by the toilet-table. She sat down for
a few minutes thoughtfully, then opened her letter to Norah, and turned
to the end where the blank space was left. The last lines written above
the space ran thus: "... I have laid my whole heart bare to you; I
have hidden nothing. It has come to this. The end I have toiled for, at
such terrible cost to myself, is an end which I must reach or die. It
is wickedness, madness