It was clear moonlight that night: Vin’s room faced the sea. Hour after hour he sate at the window, looking on the wide, grey plain and the faint blue-grey skies; and getting no good of either; for the far-searching doves of his thoughts came back to him without a twig of hope in their bill. The whole world seemed empty—and silent. He began to recall the time in which he used to think—or to fear—that some day a vast and solitary sea would come between Maisrie and himself; it was something he had dreamed or imagined; but this was altogether different now—this blank ignorance of where she might be was a far more terrible thing. He went over the different places he had heard her mention—Omaha, Chicago, Boston, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec: they only seemed to make the world the wider—to remove her further away from him, and interpose a veil between. She had vanished like a vision; and yet it was but the other day that he had found her clinging tight to his arm, her beautiful brown hair blown wet about her face, her eyes with love shining through her tears, her lips—when he kissed them—salt with the flying spray. And no longer—after that first and sudden outburst of indignant wrath—did he accuse her of any faithlessness or treachery: rather it was himself whom he reproached. Had he not promised, at the very moment when she had made her maiden confession to him, and spoken to him as a girl speaks once only in her life, had he not promised that always and always he would say to himself ’Wherever Maisrie is—wherever she may be—she loves me, and is thinking of me?’ This was the Mizpah set up between those two; and he had vowed his vow. What her going away might mean he could not tell; but at all events it was not permitted him to doubt—he dared not doubt—her love.