The strokes counted twelve—midnight. She shuddered as he rose to his feet.
“My love—my life!” he said, and clasped her close.
“God keep you!” she breathed.
He left her and went a few steps into the darkness. She thought him gone. But he came back swiftly, his hands groping.
He heard a shuddering sob tear its way from her heart, but she stood motionless in his arms, her cheek grown suddenly cold against his own.
In that moment a strange feeling had come to her that they clasped each other now for the last time. It was as though an icy hand were pressed upon her heart, stilling its pulsations.
She felt his arms again release her and knew she was alone.
It lacked an hour of day when Gordon rode into Leghorn, and the first streak of dawn strove vainly to shred the curdled mist as he stepped from a lighter aboard the Hercules. The tide was at full and a rising breeze flapped the canvas.
Standing apart on her deck, his mind abstracted, though his ears were humming with the profane noises of creaking cordage, windlass and capstan, he felt as if the fall of the headsman’s ax had divided his soul in two. He saw his past rolled up like a useless palimpsest in the giant hand of destiny—his future an unvexed scroll laid waiting for mystic characters yet unformed and unimagined. Beneath the bitterness of parting, be felt, strangely enough, a kind of peace wider than he had ever known. The hatred that tracked, the Nemesis that had harassed, he left behind him.