eve in what had happened, now. He
stood upon the very spot; here was the semicircle of railing, the
camp-stools, the white cabin-wall against which he had leaned. But the
blackness of night had so utterly past away that it seemed as though
the deed done in it must in some manner have vanished likewise. What
is fact at one time looks unreal at another. It must be associated
with all times and moods before it can be fully comprehended and
accepted.

Glancing down at the deck, Helwyse saw there the cigar he had been
smoking the night before, flattened out by the tread of a foot, and
lying close beside it a sparkling ring. He picked it up; it was a
diamond of purest water, curiously caught between the mouths of two
little serpents, whose golden and black bodies, twisted round each
other, formed the hoop. Realizing, after a moment, from whose finger
it must have fallen, he had an impulse to fling it far into the sea;
but his second thought was not to part from it. The idea of its former
owner must indeed always be hateful to his murderer; but the bond
between their souls was closer and more indissoluble than that between
man and wife; and of so unnatural a union this ring was a fair emblem.
Unnatural though the union were, to Helwyse it seemed at the time
better than total solitude.

He felt heavy and inelastic,--averse to himself, but still more to
society. He wished to see men and women, yet not to be seen of them.
He had used to be ready in speech, and willing to listen; now, no
subject interested him save one,--on which his lips must be forever
closed. When the sun had made himself thoroughly at home on earth and
in heaven, Helwyse went to his state-room, feeling unclean from the
soul outwards. While making his toilet, he took care to leave the
window-blind up, that he might at any time see the blue sky and water,
and the bright shore, with its foliage and occasional houses. He
shrank from severing, even for an instant, his communication with the
beneficent spirit of nature. And yet Nature could not comfort him,--in
his extremest need he found her most barren. He had been wont to
rejoice in her as the creature of his own senses; but when he asked
her to sympathize with his pain, she laughed at him,--the magnificent
coquette!--and bade him, since she was only the reflection of himself,
be content with his own sympathy. Truly, if man and Nature be thus
allied, and God be but man developed, then is self-sufficiency the
o