To Kate Bindane she confessed all that had occurred on that fatal night. “I don’t want to be romantic,” she told her. “I don’t want to make more of the thing than there was really in it. But his death means more to me than it does to any of you others. I can’t forget the sight of the soles of his shoes disappearing into that black water. It’s as though I’d seen Death himself swallow him up. I had always thought of Death as a sort of unknown country where one goes to; but in this case I saw it come for him and swallow him. I saw it as an ink-black monster; it snapped him up, and spit out the limp shell of him, but kept the essence of him in its stomach. And it’s waiting to snap up you and me. It’s close at hand, always close at hand....”
She shuddered as she spoke; and her friend, putting her strong arm around her, found difficulty in soothing her.
“Well, perhaps,” she replied, “it was an act of Providence to save you from a mistaken marriage.”
“O, but he loved me,” said Muriel, “and I should have come to love him entirely. He was so sweet, so good-natured.”
“Perhaps there’s something better in store for you, old girl.”
Muriel shook her head. “No,” she answered, “there’s nothing much but Death for any of us. It all comes to that in the end: it all leads just to Death.”
“Well, then, let’s eat, drink, and be merry,” said her friend.
“Yes,” Muriel replied, with conviction. “That’s what I’m going to do. Omar Khayyam was right: I’ve been reading him again.”
“He was a wise old bird,” Kate Bindane commented. “Wasn’t he the fellow who said something about a bottle of claret and a hunk of bread-and-butter in the desert? I’ve always thought it a fine conception of bliss.”
Muriel clasped her hands together, and looked up with youthful fervour. “Yes,” she replied, “and he said ‘Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend, Before we too into the dust descend,’ and ‘Ah, fill the cup:—what boots it to repeat how time is slipping underneath our feet.’”