Beyond the Rocks

This visit must be the last time she should meet her love. She must tell

him, implore him--he who was free and master of his life; he must go

away, must promise not to follow her, must help her to do what was right

and just. She had no sentimental feeling of personal wickedness now. How

could it be wicked to love--to love truly and tenderly? She had not

sought love; he had come upon her. It would be wicked to give way to her

feelings, to take Hector for a lover; but she had no sense of being a

wicked woman as things were, any more than if she had badly burned her

hand and was suffering deeply from the wound; she would have considered

herself wicked for having had the mischance thus to injure herself. She

was intensely unhappy, and she was going to try and do what was right.

That was all. And God and those kind angels who steered the barks beyond

the rocks would perhaps help her.

Hector for his part, had retired to rest boiling with passion and rage,

the subtle, odious insinuations of Mildred ringing in his ears. The

remembrance of the menace on Morella's dull face as she had watched

Theodora depart, and, above all, Wensleydown's behavior as they all said

good-night: nothing for him actually to take hold of, and yet enough to

convulse him with jealous fury.

Oh, if she were only his own! No man should dare to look at her like

that. But Josiah had stood by and not even noticed it.

Passionate jealousy is not a good foster-parent for prudence.

The Sunday came, and with it a wild, mad longing to be near her

again--never to leave her, to prevent any one else from so much as

saying a word. Others besides Wensleydown had begun to experience the

attraction of her beauty and charm. If considerations of wisdom should

keep him from her side, he would have the anguish of seeing these

others take his place, and that he could not suffer.

And as passion in a man rages higher than in the average woman,

especially passion when accelerated by the knowledge of another's desire

to rob it of its own, so Hector's conclusions were not so clear as

Theodora's.

He dared not look ahead. All he was conscious of was the absolute

determination to protect her from Wensleydown--to keep her for himself.

And fate was gathering all the threads together for an inevitable

catastrophe, or so it seemed to the Crow when the long, exquisite June

Sunday evening was drawing to a close and he looked back on the day.