strong enough to talk as much as she did in that interview. She nerved
herself to make the effort, and as she bade me farewell, bade farewell
to life also. And now it was all over with her!

* * * * *

I fell asleep at length, and woke late. It seemed as if a year had
dropped out of the procession of Time. My heart was still beating with
the emotion which stirred it when Redmond and I were together last.
Recollection had stung me to the quick. A terrible longing urged me to
go and find him. The feeling I had when we were in the boat, face to
face, thrilled my fibres again. I saw his gleaming eyes; I could have
rushed through the air to meet him. But, alas! exaltation of feeling
lasts only a moment; it drops us where it finds us. If it were not so,
how easy to be a hero! The dull reaction of the present, like a slow
avalanche, crushed and ground me into nothingness.

"Something must happen at last," I thought, "to amuse me, and make time
endurable."

What can a woman do, when she knows that an epoch of feeling is rounded
off, finished, dead? Go back to her story-books, her dress-making, her
worsted-work? Shall she attempt to rise to mediocrity on the piano or
in drawing, distribute tracts, become secretary of a Dorcas society? or
shall she turn her mind to the matter of cultivating another lover at
once? Few of us women have courage enough to shoulder out the corpses
of what men leave in our hearts. We keep them there, and conceal the
ruins in which they lie. We grow cunning and artful in our tricks, the
longer we practise them. But how we palpitate and shrink and shudder,
when we are alone in the dark!