tion of the sea, which she divined in the distance flashing with sudden illuminations, with noiseless reflections, and then vanishing in the low-hanging clouds of the night.
She lay back in her chair, at first oppressed by her doubt and by the heat, but gradually, gradually—her eyes fixed on the electric gleams far in the distance—all her doubts melted away, the enchantment penetrated yet deeper and the storm-charged sultriness seemed a languorous ecstasy in which her breast heaved gently, her lips opened and her eyes closed, only to open again, wider than before, and stare at the lightning that flashed and vanished, flashed and vanished, with intervals full of mystery . . .
No, she doubted no longer: all would be well, all would be well . . . She could not make a mistake in this new life, this later life, this mature life, which she had lived, so to speak, in a few months, giving herself up entirely to sincerity and honesty and to the crowning love, the only really true and lofty love. Her love, that late love, had been her life, right from those girlish dreams of a few months past down to the moment of inward avowal; and what in another woman would have lasted years, in the slow falling of the days, which, like beads on a long string, fell one by one through the fingers of silent fate, the unrelenting teller of the beads, she had lived in a few months: after her dreaming had come
