At the present time she ought to have been putting her whole heart into her examination, which loomed close, but she merely placed her Cicero and her Euclid and The Essay on Man in a stack on the wash-stand to be in readiness when she could spare time, and fell to covering sheets of exercise-book paper with the woes of one Gwendolen Trevallion. And her spirits, saddened at the news about Alf, caused her to drown Gwendolen with detail and gloom, and many harrowing last words.
Next week when the paper came out, the impressionable ones among the school-girls would weep at the sad end of the heroine, whose chequered career they had followed in very short chapters for months. And but for Alf she might have been left alive to pursue her adventures indefinitely. But Dolly also wept as she wrote; the tears invariably ran down her cheeks when she was engaged in killing any one, but [212] ]she never flinched from a detail of the death on that account.
“And now,” she wrote, when the evening waxed late, and she knew a certain number of those lesson-books must at all events be looked at, “now at length Gwendolen was left alone—alone with death. Yes, she could deceive herself no longer; before the man could lay down Ermentrude, for whom she had given her life, and swim back to her through the voracious, clamouring sea” (it need hardly be said that Gwendolen had gone to save Ermentrude, who had ventured on to a dangerous part of the coast and was cut off by the tide), “the waves would be dashing high above the narrow ledge where she stood, and she would be ‘where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’ So young, so fair for death she seemed. She was clad in a simple white muslin dress, her deep violet eyes with their long sweeping black lashes looked like frightened stars, her heavy golden waves of hair blew out with the wind” (anyone’s hair but Gwendolen’s would have been wet, seeing she had been in the water), “and seemed to make a halo for her face. No cry of anguish rose to her sweet white lips as the last wave rolled up for its victim . . . a holy solemn light shone in her eyes; already the scales of this dim earthly vision seemed falling from them, already she seemed to see beyond the veil—the veil white Death alone can lift.
“The advancing wave rolled up and broke . . . sweeping over the rock, shooting its spray high into [213] ]the air and retreating, leaving the ledge vacant. Gwendolen was gone . . . gone to a fairer heritage than earth . . . gone Home.
“‘Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.
And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;