consented to become my wife.  I saw again the face of Jackson, his eyes, his reverence when he kissed the brow of Dorothy; his tears and his feeble step when he walked away from us.  And I lived over early Chicago, all my days with Douglas.  Where was he now on that flattened, negligible map called America?  In what soil had Zoe moldered into the earth?  What had become of Fortescue?  Where were Abigail and Aldington, Reverdy, Sarah, this night?  How could the millions storming over slavery and war, territories, sugar and cotton and iron, gold and railways think of these things if they were face to face with a reality as stark as I was, in a boat rolled by dark water, tossing forward toward Europe and with a burden like the dead body of Dorothy?  All this night I walked the deck.  I saw the dawn come up, ragged and blue, patched with dark clouds, which the wind drove close to the mounting waves.

The captain ordered an autopsy.  Dorothy had died of heart failure.  Then there was to be a burial at sea.  In the afternoon the clouds lifted from the sky.  Toward the west the sun burned over the water, making a wake of fire from the boat to the utmost horizon.  I took a last look at Dorothy, kissed her cold brow.  Then she was wrapped with sheets on a plank weighted with iron, and taken to the stern of the boat.  I stood near to see it all, with little Reverdy weeping as if his heart would break.

The body is cast into the water, and in the very golden wake of the sun.  I cannot hear the splash; I only see a slight flap of the sheet.  The water closes over instantly.  A gull frightened into a slight veering off turns to the spot where Dorothy has disappeared.  No ripples to mark the place where she has been received by the sea!  The boat has gone on without staying.  I keep my eyes fixed on the place.  Waves cross and recross over it.  The sunlight shifts.  Tears and the sun blind my eyes.  I rest them a moment and then look again.  Where was it that Dorothy sank?  What great fish started at the splash, the white apparition; and then returned to nibble?  To what depths has Dorothy sunk?  To what darker waters has she been towed by some creature of prey?  The sailors have gone to their other duties.  Little Reverdy is by my side, weeping softly.  I must write to the older Reverdy back in Jacksonville.  He is her only relation in the world.  To-night I must sleep, if I can.

But I do not sleep.  I wonder if I have been a good husband to Dorothy.  What was she doing, how living, in the years past, when I was absorbed in business, following the fortunes of Douglas, studying the books that had no bearing upon her happiness nor, alas, upon mine?  I saw her now as patient, sometimes alone, perhaps always waiting for me, but never complaining.  How many happy hours had I sacrificed to other things when I might have been with her!  Was Dorothy happy?  Did she love me?  I began to think over the occasions of her demonstrations of affection—­after all how few they were!  Always tender toward me, but how infrequently were there moments of passion, of ecstasy.  Had I awakened all of her nature?  Had I been living a neutral life all these years?  Was I in some sort a negligible character, without magnetism, of unfulfilled passion?  A slumbering nature?