She was “alone with her dead” and nothing mattered any more now.
She remained motionless for several long moments, while over her head something that resembled eternity seemed to pass by, on beautiful, terrible, beating wings.
Then she rose up upon her feet.
“She shall never have him!” she murmured. “She shall never have him!”
She tore from her waist a strongly-woven embroidered cord, the long tassels of which hung down at her side. She dragged the dead man to the very edge of the water. With an incredible effort, she raised him up till he leant, limp and heavy, against her own body.
Then, supporting him with difficulty, and with difficulty keeping herself from sinking under his weight, she twisted the cord round them both, and tied it in a secure knot. Holding him thus before her, with his chin resting on her shoulder, she staggered forward into the water.
It was not easy to advance, and her heart seemed on the point of breaking with the strain. But the savage thought that she was taking him away from Nance—from Nance and from every one—to possess him herself forever, gave her a supernatural strength.
It seemed as though the demon of madness, which had passed from Adrian at the last, and left him free, had entered into her.
If that was indeed the case, it is more than likely that when she fell at last—fell backwards under his weight beneath the waves—it was rather with a mad ecstasy of abandonment that she drank the choking water, than with any hopeless struggle to escape the end she had willed.
Bound tightly together, both by the girl’s clinging arms and by the cord she had fastened round them, the North Sea as it drew back in the out-flowing of its tide, carried their bodies forth into the darkness.