alleyway, alone,
unsheltered, a pathetic figure in the drifting mist, her clothes damp
around her, a woman leaned with bowed head against the ship's side. A
wave of pity, but a pity that knew bitterness and irony, came upon him.
What would he read in the face of this poor immigrant if he could but
see it? Misery? She looked miserable enough! Loneliness? Was she
lonely, too? Was she as lonely as he? And then, as though in answer
to his thoughts, she turned suddenly, lifting her face, and with a
gesture of infinite yearning, of infinite longing, stretched out her
arms toward the land, toward France, so far behind.

He did not move. He uttered no sound. In that moment, as she made
that gesture, he was living only subconsciously. It was his beacon
with outstretched arms, with those pure, perfect lips, with that sweet,
gentle face, beautiful even with the pallor that was upon it. _It was
Marie-Louise_!

The voices, the waltz strains, the throb of the engine, the sounds
about him, the lift and fall of the liner's deck, the blackness of the
night, all were blotted from him. He was conscious only of that figure
on the deck below. There she stood, her arms
outstretched--outstretched as he had modelled her in that figure that
first had brought him fame, and his own words of the days gone by were
ringing in his ears again. "See, it is a beacon--the welcome of the
fisherman home from the sea. And are you not that, Marie-Louise, and
will you not stand on the shore at evening and hold out your arms for
me as I pull home in the boat? Are you not the beacon,
Marie-Louise--for me?" A welcome he had called it then, that posture
of outstretched arms, that now symbolised, mute in its anguish, the
tearing away from her of all that life had ever held to make it glad
and joyous, the love of cherished France, her native country, her home,
the friends that made home dear, those that loved her, those she loved.
Those she loved! And of them all, she had loved him, Jean Laparde--the
most! It seemed to sound the depths of some abysmal treason in his
soul. Whom or what had she to welcome now? It seemed to sum up all
the tragedy that life could hold, and sweep upon him and engulf him.
It was Marie-Louise standing there on the steerage deck! It was
Marie-Louise! He did not need to ask why--the answer was in his own
soul.

And now a moan broke from his lips; and condemnation, stripped of
mercy, naked, bare in its remorseless