The night--that night of dreadful tragedy--had changed her. Columbine,
the passionate, the impulsive had turned into a being that was foreign
to herself. All the happy girlhood had been stamped out of her as by the
cruel pressure of a hot iron. She had ceased to feel the agony of it;
somehow she did not think that she ever could feel pain again. The nerve
tissues had been destroyed and all vitality was gone. The creature that
passed like a swift shadow through the twilight of the dawn was an old
and withered woman who had lived beyond her allotted time.

She reached the old Ship Inn, meeting no one. She entered by the door of
the conservatory through which she had flitted æons and æons before to
meet her lover. She went to her room and changed into her own clothes.
The suit that had belonged to Rufus so long ago she laid away with an
odd reverence, still scarcely knowing what she did, driven as it were by
a mechanism that worked without any volition of hers.

Then she went to the glass and began to coil up her hair. It was dank
and heavy yet with the seawater, but she wound it about her head without
noticing. The light was growing, and she peered at herself with a
detached sort of curiosity, till something in her own eyes frightened
her, and she turned away.

She went to the window and opened it wide. The sound of the sea yet
filled the world, but it was not so insistent as it had been. The waves,
though mountainous still, were gradually receding from the shore. It was
as though the dawn had come just in time to prevent the powers of
darkness from triumphing.

She heard someone moving in the house and turned back into the room.