“What can I do?” I asked myself.

Now that Martin was gone I had begun to understand him.  His silence had betrayed his heart to me even more than his speech could have done.  Towering above him like a frowning mountain was the fact that I was a married woman and he was trying to stand erect in his honour as a man.

“He must be suffering too,” I told myself.

That was a new thought to me and it cut me to the quick.

When it came to me first I wanted to run after him and throw myself into his arms, and then I wanted to run away from him altogether.

I felt as if I were on the brink of two madnesses—­the madness of breaking my marriage vows and the madness of breaking the heart of the man who loved me.

“Oh, what can I do?” I asked myself again.

I wanted him to go; I wanted him to stay; I did not know what I wanted.  At length I remembered that in ordinary course he would be going in two days more, and I said to myself: 

“Surely I can hold out that long.”

But when I put this thought to my breast, thinking it would comfort me, I found that it burnt like hot iron.

Only two days, and then he would be gone, lost to me perhaps for ever.  Did my renunciation require that?  It was terrible!

There was a piano in the room, and to strengthen and console myself in my trouble I sat down to it and played and sang.  I sang “Ave Maria Stella.”

I was singing to myself, so I know I began softly—­so softly that my voice must have been a whisper scarcely audible outside the room—­

     “Hail thou star of ocean,
     Portal of the sky.”

But my heart was full and when I came to the verses which always moved me most—­

     “Virgin of all virgins,
     To thy shelter take us”—­

my voice, without my knowing it, may have swelled out into the breathless night until it reached Martin, where he walked on the dark headland, and sounded to him like a cry that called him back.

I cannot say.  I only know that when with a thickening throat I had come to an end, and my forehead had fallen on to the key-board, and there was no other sound in the air but the far-off surging of the sea.  I heard somebody calling me in a soft and tremulous whisper,

“Mary!”

It was he.  I went out to the balcony and there he was on the lawn below.  The light of the room was on him and never before had I seen his strong face so full of agitation.

“Come down,” he said.  “I have something to say to you.”

I could not resist him.  He was my master.  I had to obey.

When I reached the bottom of the stairway he took my hand, and I did not know whether it was his hand or mine that was trembling.  He led me across the lawn to the seat in the shrubbery that almost faced my windows.  In the soft and soundless night I could hear his footsteps on the turf and the rustle of my dress over the grass.