‘Our God indeed!’ I cried, getting very excited:  ’girl! you talk speciously, but falsely! whence have you these thoughts in that head of yours?  Girl! you talk of “our race”!  But there are only two of us left?  Are you talking at me, Leda?  Do not I follow Destiny?’

‘You?’ she sighed, with down-bent face:  ‘ah, poor me!’

‘What should I do if I followed it?’ said I, with a crazy curiosity.

Her face hung lower, paler, in trouble:  and she said: 

’You would come now and sit near me here.  You would not be there where you are.  You would be always and for ever near me....’

My good God!  I felt my face redden.

‘Oh, I could not tell you...!’ I cried:  ’you talk the most disastrous...! you lack all responsibility...!  Never, never...!’

Her face now was covered with her left hand, her right on the tiller:  and bitingly she said, with a touch of venom: 

’I could make you come—­now, if I chose:  but I will not:  I will wait upon my God....’

‘Make me!’ I cried:  ‘Leda!  How make me?’

’I could cly before you, as I cly often and often ... in seclet ... for my childlen....’

‘You cry in secret?  This is news—­’

’Yes, yes, I cly.  Is not the burden of the world heavy upon me, too? and the work I have to do vely, vely gleat?  And often and often I cly in seclet, thinking of it:  and I could cly now if I chose, for you love your little girl so much, that you could not lesist me one minute....’

Now I saw the push and tortion and trembling of her poor little under-lip, boding tears:  and at once a flame was in me which was altogether beyond control; and crying out:  ‘why, my poor dear,’ I found myself in the act of rushing through the staggering boat to take her to me.

Mid-way, however, I was saved:  a whisper, intense as lightning, arrested me:  ’Forward is no escape, nor backward, but sideward there may be a way!’ And at a sudden impulse, before I knew what I was doing, I was in the water swimming.

The smaller of the islands was two hundred yards away, and thither I swam, rested some minutes, and thence to the Castle.  I did not once look behind me.

* * * * *

Well, from 11 A.M. till five in the afternoon, I thought it all out, lying in the damp flannels on my face on the sofa in the recess beside my bed, where it was quite dark behind the tattered piece of arras:  and what things I suffered that day, and what deeps I sounded, and what prayers I prayed, God knows.  What infinitely complicated the awful problem was this thought in my head:  that to kill her would be far more merciful to her than to leave her alone, having killed myself:  and, Heaven knows, it was for her alone that I thought, not at all caring for myself.  To kill her was better:  but to kill her with my own hands—­that was too hard