he strangeness of this white darkness, suffused with
moonlight, yet in this immediate neighbourhood of the Falls,
impenetrable. She was impatient to get through it; to breathe an
unembarrassed air.

The roar at her left hand grew wilder. She had reached a point some
distance from the hotel, close to the jutting corner, once open, now
walled and protected, where the traveller approaches nearest to the edge
of the Canadian Fall. She knew the spot well, and groping for the wall,
she stood breathless and spray-beaten beside the gulf.

Only a few yards from her the vast sheet of water descended. She could
see nothing of it, but the wind of its mighty plunge blew back her hair,
and her mackintosh cloak was soon dripping with the spray. Once, far
away, above the Falls, she seemed to perceive a few dim lights along the
bend of the river; perhaps from one of the great power-houses that tame
to man's service the spirits of the water. Otherwise--nothing! She was
alone with the perpetual challenge and fascination of the Falls.

As she stood there she was seized by a tragic recollection. It was from
this spot, so she believed, that Leopold Verrier had thrown himself
over. The body had been carried down through the rapids, and recovered,
terribly injured, in the deep eddying pool which the river makes below
them. He had left no letter or message of any sort behind him. But the
reasons for his suicide were clearly understood by a large public, whose
main verdict upon it was the quiet "What else could he do?"

Here, then, on this very spot, he had stood before his leap. Daphne had
heard him described by various spectators of the marriage. He had been,
it seemed, a man of sensitive temperament, who should have been an
artist and was a man of business; a considerable musician, and something
of a poet; proud of his race and faith and himself irreproachable, yet
perpetually wounded through his family, which bore a name of ill-repute
in the New York business world; passionately grateful to his wife for
having married him, delighting in her beauty and charm, and foolishly,
abjectly eager to heap upon her and their child everything that wealth
could buy.

"It was Madeleine's mother who made it hopeless," thought Daphne. "But
for Mrs. Fanshaw--it might have lasted."

And memory called up Mrs. Fanshaw, the beautifully dressed woman of
fifty, with her pride of wealth and family, belonging to the strictest
sect of New York's social _elite_,