Chloe drew the silken string from her bosom, as she descended the dim pathway through the furies, and set her fingers travelling along it for the number of the knots. ‘I have no right to be living,’ she said. Seven was the number; seven years she had awaited her lover’s return; she counted her age and completed it in sevens. Fatalism had sustained her during her lover’s absence; it had fast hold of her now. Thereby had she been enabled to say, ‘He will come’; and saying, ‘He has come,’ her touch rested on the first knot in the string. She had no power to displace her fingers, and the cause of the tying of the knot stood across her brain marked in dull red characters, legible neither to her eye nor to her understanding, but a reviving of the hour that brought it on her spirit with human distinctness, except of the light of day: she had a sense of having forfeited light, and seeing perhaps more clearly. Everything assured her that she saw more clearly than others; she saw too when it was good to cease to live. Hers was the unhappy lot of one gifted with poet-imagination to throb with the woman supplanting her and share the fascination of the man who deceived. At their first meeting, in her presence, she had seen that they were not strangers; she pitied them for speaking falsely, and when she vowed to thwart this course of evil it to save a younger creature of her sex, not in rivalry. She treated them both with a proud generosity surpassing gentleness. All that there was of selfishness in her bosom resolved to the enjoyment of her one month of strongly willed delusion. The kiss she had sunk to robbed no one, not even her body’s purity, for when this knot was tied she consigned herself to her end, and had become a bag of dust. The other knots in the string pointed to verifications; this first one was a suspicion, and it was the more precious, she felt it to be more a certainty; it had come from the dark world beyond us, where all is known. Her belief that it had come thence was nourished by testimony, the space of blackness wherein she had lived since, exhausting her last vitality in a simulation of infantile happiness, which was nothing other than the carrying on of her emotion of the moment of sharp sour sweet--such as it may be, the doomed below attain for their knowledge of joy--when, at the first meeting with her lover, the perception of his treachery to the soul confiding in him, told her she had lived, and opened out the cherishable kingdom of insensibility to her for her heritage. She made her tragic humility speak thankfully to the wound that slew her. ‘Had it not been so, I should not have seen him,’ she said:--Her lover would not have come to her but for his pursuit of another woman. She pardoned him for being attracted by that beautiful transplant of the fields: pardoned her likewise. ‘He when I saw him first was as beautiful to me. For him I might have done as much.’