"I love you now as I never loved you," returns he, with sudden, eager passion. Her arms are round his neck, her head is thrown back, her lovely eyes, almost terrible now in their intensity, are gazing into his. Instinctively his arms close around her—he bends forward.
A shout from the beach! The boat is launched, and they only await him to go upon their perilous journey. When death is near, small things of earth grow even less.
"They call me! All is over now between us," he murmurs, straining her to his heart. Then he puts her a little away from him—still holding her—and looks once more into her large, tearless eyes. "If life on earth is done," he says, solemnly, "then in heaven, my soul, we meet again!"
He lays his lips on hers.
"In heaven, my love, and soon!" returns she, very quietly, and so they part!
It is but a little half-hour afterwards when they bring him back again, and lay him gently and in silence upon the wet sand—cold and dead! Some spar had struck him, they hardly know what, and had left him as they brought him home.
Many voices are uplifted at this sad return, but all grow hushed and quiet as a girl with bare head presses her way resolutely through the crowd, and, moving aside those who would mercifully have delayed her, having reached her dead, sits down upon the sand beside him, and, lifting his head in her arms, dank and dripping with sea-foam, lays it tenderly upon her knees. Stooping over it, she presses it lovingly against her breast, and with tender fingers smooths back from the pale forehead the short, wet masses of his dark hair. She is quite calm, her fingers do not even tremble, but there is a strange, strange look in her great eyes.
His eyes are closed. No ugly stain of blood mars the beauty of his face. He lies calm and placid in her embrace, as though wrapt in softest slumber—but oh! how irresponsive to the touch that once would have thrilled his every sense with rapture!
There is something so awful in the muteness of her despair, that a curious hush falls upon those grouped around her—and him. The whole scene is so fraught with a weird horror, that when one woman in the background bursts into bitter weeping, she is pushed out of sight, as though emotion of a demonstrative nature is out of place just here. Noisy grief can have no part in this hopeless sorrow.