"I will sit here until you sleep."
"Thank you. You are a good, dear boy. Good-night, Leon."
"Good-night, Elsa."
There was stillness in the room—utter stillness as at last Percivale laid his sleeping wife down, and, bending over her, bestowed a parting kiss.
He felt somewhat as a man who gazes upon the dead form of one beloved.
His dream-Elsa was a thing of the past—vanished, dead.
What would the fresh life be like which he must begin with her? A life of strain—of the heavy knowledge that never while he lived could he hope for sympathy, could he satisfy the mighty craving of his soul for a wife who should be to him what Claud Cranmer's wife was to her husband.
Everything was changed.
Never, in all his solitary youth, in all the remote wanderings of the Swan, not even when he laid to rest his tutor, the one friend of his childhood, had he felt the terror of loneliness as he felt it now. It was grey dawn when he came down to the beach. Müller, who was on the look-out, saw the misty figure of his master standing upon the shore, and at once launched the gig and took him on board.
With the gradual dawn, a faint breeze sprang up and lifted the mist that hung over the sea.