Not a gleam fell from the veiled moon. Not a thing was visible save a faint phosphorescent line that moved slowly inward. Lora could not see Alastair's face, not even his body, not even the two shaking hands she held over him while she prayed inaudibly, and with a suffocating, bewildering pain at her heart, at her lungs, in her head.
No sound came from the isle. The noise of the falling stream in the glen was merged in the confused clamour of the tide-race. Shoreward, there was that awful tidal whisper. Seaward, the march of wave after wave, of billow after billow, in vast processional array; squadron after squadron, battalion after battalion, of the innumerable army of the deep: and among them all, over them all, beneath them all, a Voice, loud, reverberant, menacing, awful as brooding thunder, terrible as the quaking of the dry land when the hills o'er-topple the cities of the plain: a Voice as of the majesty of Death, swelling through the night with all the eternal pain, the forlorn travail, the incommunicable ache of all the weary, weary World.
Then, ere all remembrance died for her, Lora knew that Alastair slept and was at peace.
She stole her arm round his neck and held him close, but was too weak now to lean over and kiss those white lips, parted as a child's in dreamless slumber.
It was her last pain: the last unavailing bitterness of woman's woe.
Thereafter she lay still, vaguely hearkening the tide run up the deep channel beyond the little isle of sand, already damp with the underooze.
She listened to the slipping of the water along the ledges. A wave came out of the darkness and stalked through the gloom as a wild beast to its lair. Ledge over ledge she heard it swiftly move: then suddenly there was a blank ... a hoarse muffled noise ... the hollow reverberation of the billow as it fell heavily into the black unfathomed gulf wherein at the flood was swept all that drifted into the cave.
A windy sigh arose in the cavern. The tide moved upward, feeling along the walls with stealthy, groping hands. A faint phosphorescence appeared momently, now here, now there.
The second channel, to the left, suddenly brimmed. The water spilled over upon the sandy tract beyond. Then a long rolling wave raced inward, leaped along one of its ledges, poised a moment, and, breaking into a seething foam in its fall, tore this away and that the weedy bonds which bound the sleepers.
Beyond, in the darkness, the loud moan, the deep, monotonous boom of the sea filled the whole vast void of the night.