For a long moment appalled she gazed, knowing yet but one fathom of her misery: just her loss, her mere great loss past repair. Then moaning feebly, her arms went round again to draw it close. Her smooth palms gliding over the body told of flawed surfaces, bidding her eyes leave the face to read new scores: on the breast a deep rent, on the shoulder another, and further more and more wherever a hand went. Along one arm she stretched hers, and lifted it up to the light of the moon. Beside the tense, slender limb, gleaming white, that other showed massive, inert, grey-hued, with darker breaks. The hand hanging heavy was a dark horror to see.
Shadows invaded, for the moon was foundering on the rocks.
Across her shoulders she drew the heavy burden, strove to rise upright to bear it, tottered, fell, and then dragged on with elbows and knees as the waves resigned to her the full load. Heavy knees furrowed the sand beside hers, heavy arms trailed; the awful, cold face drooped and swayed from her shoulder as she moved; now and again it touched her cheek.
Withdrawn from the fatal sea, what gain had she? The last spark of life was long extinct, and she knew it; yet a folly very human set her seeking Christian's self in the shell that was left, scanning it, handling it, calling upon deaf ears, drawing the wet head against her breast. Cold, cold was her breast; the sea-magic had bred out all heat from her heart.
She pressed the dripping hair; she stooped and kissed her dead lover on the lips. It was then her iniquity struck home with merciless rigour complete. 'I will lay my face down against yours, and out of very pure hate will kiss you once. Even in the death-agony I mean you to know my fingers in your hair.'
The wretched soul writhed as the hideous words rose up against her to damn. They were alive with every tone and laugh; they would live stinging and eating out her heart until she died.
And after death?
'Christian! Christian!'
The agonised cry now was no effort to waken deaf ears; it called after Christian himself, gone past reach of her remorse into unknown night. Gone deliberately, to be finally quit of so abhorred a creature? In mute witness the quiet body lay to vindicate Christian: too broken it was, too darkly grey for any death self-willed.
Then she could look upon the blank face no more, for the moon passed quite away. Then the stretching tide came lapping and fawning, soon to sway the dead weight she held. She was not worthy to look upon clay so sacred, she was not worthy to touch it, she who in wanton moods had inclined to a splendid male, nor recognised in him a nobler version of love. No spark of profane passion could remain after she had kissed the cold, dead face.