But, as Paris receded farther and farther behind him, and the sea drew nearer, and the shores of the country which held Isabel Bretherton, it was but natural that even the grip upon him of this terrible and startling calamity should relax a little, and that he should realise himself as a man seeking the adored woman, his veins still beating with the currents of youth, and the great unguessed future still before him. He had left Marie in the grave, and his life would bear the scar of that loss for ever. But Isabel Bretherton was still among the living, the warm, the beautiful, and every mile brought him nearer to the electric joy of her presence. He took a sad strange pleasure in making the contrast between the one picture and the other as vivid as possible. Death and silence on the one side--oh, how true and how irreparable! But on the other, he forced on his imagination till it drew for him an image of youth and beauty so glowing that it almost charmed the sting out of his grief. The English paper which he succeeded in getting at Calais contained the announcement: 'Miss Bretherton has, we are glad to say, completely recovered from the effects of the fainting fit which so much alarmed the audience at the _Calliope_ last week. She was able to play _Elvira_ as usual last night, and was greeted by a large and sympathetic house.' He read it, and turned the page hastily, as if what the paragraph suggested was wholly distasteful to him. He refused altogether to think of her as weak or suffering; he shrank from his own past misgivings, his own prophecies about her. The world would be a mere dark prison-house if her bright beauty were over-clouded! She was not made for death, and she should stand to him as the image of all that escapes and resists and defies that tyrant of our years, and pain, his instrument and herald. He reached London in the midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless winter.