Such a peaceful morning! There is just light enough to see St. Mary's Rock. It is like a wavering ghost moving in the vapour on the face of the deep. I can hear the far-off murmur of the sea. It is like the humming in a big shell. A bird is singing in the garden and the swallows are twittering in a nest under the thatch. A mist is lying over the meadows, and the tree tops seem to be floating between the earth and the sky.
How beautiful the world is!
Very soon the mist will rise, and the day will break and the sun will come again and . . . there will be no more night.
[END OF THE NARRATIVE OF MARY O'NEILL]
MEMORANDUM OF MARTIN CONRAD
My darling was right. I had known all along, but I had been hoping against hope—that the voyage would set her up, and the air of the Antarctic cure her.
Then her cheerfulness never failed her, and when she looked at me with her joyous eyes, and when her soft hand slipped into mine I forgot all my fears, so the blow fell on me as suddenly as if I had never expected it.
With a faint pathetic smile she gave me her book and I went back to my room at the inn and read it. I read all night and far into the next day—all her dear story, straight from her heart, written out in her small delicate, beautiful characters, with scarcely an erasure.
No use saying what I thought or went through. So many things I had never known before! Such love as I had never even dreamt of, and could never repay her for now!