Then the man
returned. He came up the ladder and she heard him say to someone on
deck:
"Orders to go back in an hour."
His footsteps died out forward, and a somnolent, unbreathing repose took
possession of the stranded yacht.
VI
After a time this absolute silence which she almost could feel pressing
upon her on all sides induced in Mrs. Travers a state of hallucination.
She saw herself standing alone, at the end of time, on the brink of
days. All was unmoving as if the dawn would never come, the stars would
never fade, the sun would never rise any more; all was mute, still,
dead--as if the shadow of the outer darkness, the shadow of the
uninterrupted, of the everlasting night that fills the universe, the
shadow of the night so profound and so vast that the blazing suns lost
in it are only like sparks, like pin-points of fire, the restless shadow
that like a suspicion of an evil truth darkens everything upon the earth
on its passage, had enveloped her, had stood arrested as if to remain
with her forever.
And there was such a finality in that illusion, such an accord with the
trend of her thought that when she murmured into the darkness a faint
"so be it" she seemed to have spoken one of those sentences that resume
and close a life.
As a young girl, often reproved for her romantic ideas, she had
dreams where the sincerity of a great passion appeared like the ideal
fulfilment and the only truth of life.
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