lab of flat stone out of the glare of the
sun, and ate her breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, reflecting meanwhile
on the position in which she found herself. Her heart was very sore and
heavy, and almost could she wish that she were lying deep beneath those
rushing waters. She had counted upon death, and now she was not dead;
indeed, she with her shame and trouble might yet live for many a year.
She was as one who in her sleep had seemed to soar on angels' wings far
into the airy depths, and then awakened with a start to find that
she had tumbled from her bed. All the heroic scale, all the more than
earthly depth of passion, all the spiritualised desires that sprang into
being beneath the shadow of the approaching end, had come down to the
common level of an undesirable attachment, along which she must drag
her weary feet for many a year. Nor was this all. She had been false to
Bessie; more, she had broken Bessie's lover's troth. She had tempted
him and he had fallen, and now he was as bad as she. Death would have
justified all this; never would she have done it had she thought that
she was doomed to live; but now Death had cheated her, as is his fashion
with people to whom his presence is more or less desirable, leaving her
to cope with the spirit she had invoked when his sword was quivering
over her.

What would be the end of it in the event of their escape? What could be
the end except misery? It should go no farther, far as it had gone--that
she swore; no, not if it broke her heart and his too. The conditions
were altered again, and the memory of those dreadful and wondrous hours
when they two swung upon the raging river and exchanged their undying
troth, with the grave for an altar, must remain a memory and nothing
more. It had risen in their lives like some beautiful yet terrible
dream-image of celestial joy, and now like a dream it must vanish. And
yet it was no dream, except in so far as all her life was a dream and
a vision, a riddle of which glimpses of the answer came as rarely as
gleams of sunshine on a rainy day. Alas! it was no dream; it was a
portion of the living, breathing past, that, having once been, is
immortal in its every part and moment, incarnating as it does the very
spirit of immortality, an utter incapacity to change. As the act was,
as the word had been spoken, so would act and word be for ever and for
ever. And now this undying thing must be caged and cast about with
the semblance of death and