The fire is still lively in the grate, and the two lamps are beaming softly. I don't know whether it is Friday night or Saturday morning. Saturday morning, I suppose. But no going to bed till all is written down.
I stepped out of the Villa about a quarter past seven, and began crunching westward along the stones. Rage and hatred were in my heart. I almost understood those men and women who make haste on such errands as mine, grasping pistols or cold steel. The wind was in my face, but I bent into it and sped on. I was not cold. It made me glow to think how I would burst upon them, cover them with shame, fling them apart, humiliate them a thousand times more than they should ever humiliate me.
But rage and hatred did not last. Under the lee of a great black boat drawn up on the shingle, I paused to take breath. It was warm and still in that little patch of shelter, out of the nipping bluster of the wind.
While I was standing there, looking over the faintly gleaming water, a black mantle of cloud fell away from the moon. The sea became a far-spreading shimmer of silver. The little clouds sailed as curly and white as feathers from a great sea-bird's breast across the soft blue heaven. A single chime of the Bérigny church bell fell from the cliff--a single, silvery chime as if the moonlight had spoken.
At that holy call, I was born again. Rage and hatred had been strong, but I had not rage enough or hatred enough to go on standing up stubbornly against all that graciousness and beauty. It melted my heart of stone; and I knew it for an impossibility that God should be otherwise than beautiful and good. For a moment, Ruddington and Susan receded from my mind. Or, rather, I thought of them only along with all the millions of happy lovers upon whom the same sweet moon was smiling. And I blessed them unaware.
My mind came back to my errand. And then I fought the battle. Along the beach I could see the trees which shade the path; and, above the swish of the small waves, I could hear the beck humming loudly in its ravine. I was sure that they were there, under that green roof, close to that music, in this moonlight made for love. The thought burnt me like hot irons, and I could have cried aloud. Then the agony was over. I had resolved to let them be, to leave them alone with their happiness. Rage was tamed, hatred was changed to a sad, world-wide pity. But, as I turned wearily back to the clouded east, I ached and tingled all over like a beaten child.
At the first crunch of my foot on the pebbles as I turned round, some one sprang towards me from the foot of the cliff.
I cried out in terror.
He faced me in the moonlight. We were only a step or two apart. It was Ruddington.
We looked full at one another without speaking. And, as I looked, I knew that, though he could not be mine in this world, I must be his for ever and ever. Then the enormous whiteness of the cliff seemed to rock before my eyes, and the humming of the beck swelled to thunder in my ears. But he caught me before I fell.