He looked at her, and saw she was in a fever. He made a desperate clutch at her blue gown. But he was not quick enough. "Keep your promise!" she cried, and disappeared in the dreamlit waters; she disappeared like a dream, without a sound. As she sank, she heard him calling her by the only name he knew.... When she was thirty-five her father died. Now she was free to go where she pleased. But she did not go anywhere. Ever since, as a child, she had first tasted salt water, she had longed to travel and see other lands. What held her now? Was it that her longing had been satisfied? that she had a host of memories of great mountains and golden shores, of jungles and strange cities of the coast, of islands lost in seas of sapphire and emerald? of caravans and towers of ivory? of haunted caverns and deserted temples? where, a child always, with her darling boy, she had had such adventures as would have filled a hundred earthly lives. They had built huts in uninhabited places, or made a twisted bower of strong green creepers, and lived their primitive paradisal life wanting nothing but each other; sometimes, through accidents and illness, they had nursed each other, with such unwearied tenderness that death himself had to withdraw, defeated by love. Once on a ship there had been mutiny, and she alone stood by him against a throng; once savages had captured her, and he, outwitting them, had rescued her, riding through leagues of prairie-land and forest, holding her before him on the saddle. In nearly all these adventures it was as though they had met for the first time, and were struck anew with the dumb wonder of first love, and the strange shy sweetness of wooing and confession. Yet they were but playing above truth. For the knowledge was always between them that they were bound immortally by a love which, having no end, seemed also to have had no beginning. They quarreled sometimes--this was playing too. She put, now herself, now him, in the wrong. And either reconciliation was sweet. But it was she who was oftenest at fault, his forgiveness was so dear to her. And still, this was but playing at it. When all these adventures and pretenses were done, they stood heart to heart, and out of their only meeting in life built up eternal truth and told each other. They told it inexhaustibly. And so, when her father left her free to go, Helen lived on still in the mill of dreams, and kept her millstones grinding. Two years went by. And her hard gray lonely life laid its hand on her hair and her countenance. Her father had worn her out before her time.