tellectual, better-mannered,
more refined. Marriage disappoints or disgusts them, and they
impatiently put it aside. They break it up, and seem to pay no
penalty. But you and I believe that they will pay it!--that there
are divine avenging forces in the very law they tamper with--and
that, as a nation, you must either retrace some of the steps taken,
or sink in the scale of life.

"How I run on! And all because my heart is hot within me for the
suffering of one man, and the hardness of one woman!"

Boyson raised his eyes. As he did so he saw dimly through the mist the
figure of a lady, veiled, and wrapped in a fur cloak, crossing the
farther end of the veranda. He half rose from his seat, with an
exclamation. She ran down the steps leading to the road and disappeared
in the fog.

Boyson stood looking after her, his mind in a whirl.

The manager of the hotel came hurriedly out of the same door by which
Daphne Floyd had emerged, and spoke to a waiter on the veranda, pointing
in the direction she had taken.

Boyson heard what was said, and came up. A short conversation passed
between him and the manager. There was a moment's pause on Boyson's
part; he still held French's letter in his hand. At last, thrusting it
into his pocket, he hurried to the steps whereby Daphne had left the
hotel, and pursued her into the cloud outside.

The fog was now rolling back from the gorge, upon the Falls, blotting
out the transient gleams which had seemed to promise a lifting of the
veil, leaving nothing around or beneath but the white and thunderous
abyss.

CHAPTER XI

Daphne's purpose in quitting the hotel had been to find her way up the
river by the road which runs along the gorge on the Canadian side, from
the hotel to the Canadian Fall. Thick as the fog still was in the gorge
she hoped to find some clearer air beyond it. She felt oppressed and
stifled; and though she had told Madeleine that she was going out in
search of effects and spectacle, it was in truth the neighbourhood of
Alfred Boyson which had made her restless.

The road was lit at intervals by electric lamps, but after a time she
found the passage of it not particularly easy. Some repairs to the
tramway lines were going on higher up, and she narrowly escaped various
pitfalls in the shape of trenches and holes in the roadway, very
insufficiently marked by feeble lamps. But the stir in her blood drove
her on; so did t