“I wish for nothing better,” she answered. “I cannot afford to lose my friend.”
He pressed her hand for one moment to his lips, and was gone without another word.
Tears slowly welled up in Monica’s eyes as she rose at last, and stood looking out over the vast waste of heaving grey sea—sad, colourless, troubled.
“Like my life,” she said softly to herself. And yet she had just put away a love that might at least have cast a glow upon it, and gilded its dim edges.
She stretched out her hand with a sort of mute gesture of entreaty.
“Ah! Randolph, husband, come back to me! I am so lonely, so desolate!”
Even as she spoke, the setting sun, as it touched the horizon, broke through the bank of cloud which had veiled it all the day, and flooded the sea as with liquid gold—that cold grey sea that she had just been likening to her own future life.
She could not help an involuntary start.