he day; and at night when the June starlight was
on the gorge, she passed away, with the voice of the Falls in her dying
ears. A tragic beauty--"beauty born of murmuring sound--had passed into
her face;" and that great plunge of many waters, which had been to her
in life the symbol of anguish and guilt, had become in some mysterious
way the comforter of her pain, the friend of her last sleep.

A letter was found for Daphne in the little box beside her bed.

It ran thus:

DAPHNE, DARLING,--

"It was I who first taught you that we may follow our own lawless
wills, and that marriage is something we may bend or break as we
will. But, oh! it is not so. Marriage is mysterious and wonderful;
it is the supreme test of men and women. If we wrong it, and
despise it, we mutilate the divine in ourselves.

"Oh, Daphne! it is a small thing to say 'Forgive!' Yet it means the
whole world.--

"And you can still say it to the living. It has been my anguish
that I could only say it to the dead.... Daphne, good-bye! I have
fought a long, long fight, but God is master--I bless--I adore----"

Daphne sat staring at the letter through a mist of unwilling tears. All
its phrases, ideas, preconceptions, were unwelcome, unreal to her,
though she knew they had been real to Madeleine.

Yet the compulsion of the dead was upon her, and of her scene with
Boyson. What they asked of her--Madeleine and Alfred Boyson--was of
course out of the question; the mere thought of that humiliating word
"forgiveness" sent a tingle of passion through her. But was there no
third course?--something which might prove to all the world how full of
resource and generosity a woman may be?

She pondered through some sleepless hours; and at last she saw her way
plain.

Within a week she had left New York for Europe.

CHAPTER XII

The ship on which Daphne travelled had covered about half her course. On
a certain June evening Mrs. Floyd, walking up and down the promenade
deck, found her attention divided between two groups of her
fellow-travellers; one taking exercise on the same deck as herself; the
other, a family party, on the steerage deck, on which many persons in
the first class paused to look down with sympathy as they reached the
dividing rail aft.

The group on the promenade deck consisted of a lady and gentleman, and a
boy of seven. The elders walked rapidly; holding themselves stiffly
ere