He did not pass very near to her, for the little creature was cowed and shy, afraid of bringing some punishment upon him by any sign of intelligence. He tried to speak to her, tried to tell her not to wait there, exposed to the bitter wind and the lightly falling snow; but his voice was hoarse and broken, nothing escaped his lips but guttural sounds, which did not even reach her ears. So that when, after a couple of hours’ work upon the rough stones of the pier, he again came in sight of his wife, crouching in the same place, watching patiently for another brief sight of him, he took, to save her from the risks her fragile frame was running, a resolve, the execution of which cut him like a knife. He went up to the warder and said: “That is my wife. She will die of cold if she stays. Please speak to her gently.” George saw, as he turned to go back to his work, the poor child’s white frightened face as the warder addressed her. Slowly, with one long straining gaze, as if she would draw her loved one into her arms by the passionate force of her yearning eyes, she turned, and George saw her hurry away down the pier as fast as her chilled limbs would let her: and he felt that the little retreating figure which soon became a mere speck against grey sky, grey sea, grey stone, had carried away the last shred of human hope and human feeling that prison life and failing health had left in his breast. Next day, which was the last of the work in the harbour, Nouna was not on the pier; but as George took his place with the rest he found, roughly cut with a knife or some other sharp instrument in one of the large stones, the letters filled in with red chalk, these words: “I have been quite good all the time. Good-bye. N.” It was his wife’s last message to him. George knelt down and put his lips upon the stone. He had forgotten that he was not alone, but if he had remembered, it would have made no difference. The waves might wear out next tide the feebly scrawled marks which perhaps no eye but his could decipher, or the words might be read by every man, woman and child in the town--it was all the same to him now; they were engraved upon his own heart, a complete, a holy answer to every doubt which had ever troubled him, to every aspiration he had ever had for the young life he had bound to his own. Love and sorrow had sanctified her; there was no danger for his darling now.