“‘But if there are no such isles?’ he would answer; ‘If, with their magic birds and flowers, they are indeed but the baseless fabric of a dream? If your ship, amidst the ravings of the storm and the darkness of the tortured night, should founder once and for ever in the dark strait which leads to the gateways of that Dawn—those gateways through which no traveller returns to lay his fellows’ course for the harbours of your perfect sea; what then?’ “Then I would say, let me forswear God Who has suffered me to be deceived with false spirits, and sink to depths where no light breaks, where no memories stir, where no hopes torment. Yes, then let me deny Him and die, who am of all women the most miserable. But it is not so, for to me a messenger has _come_; at my prayer once the Gates were opened, and now I know quite surely that it was permitted to me to see within them that I might find strength in this the bitter hour of my trial. “Yet how can I choke the truth and tread down the human heart within me? Oh! the road which my naked feet must tread is full of thorns, and heavy the cross that I must bear. I go now, in a few minutes’ time, to bid him farewell. If I can help it I shall never see him again. No, not even after many years, since it is better not. Also, perhaps this is weakness, but I should wish him to remember me wearing such beauty as I have and still young, before time and grief and labour have marked me with their ugly scars. It is the Stella whom he found singing at the daybreak on the ship which brought her to him, for whom I desire that he should seek in the hour of a different dawn. “I go presently, to my marriage, as it were; a cold and pitiful feast, many would think it—these nuptials of life-long renunciation. The philosopher would say, Why renounce? You have some advantages, some powers, use them. The man loves you, play upon his natural weakness. Help yourself to the thing that chances to be desirable in your eyes. Three years hence who will blame you, who will even remember? His father? Well, he likes you already, and in time a man of the world accepts accomplished facts, especially if things go well, as they will do, for that invention must succeed. No one else? Yes; three others. He would remember, however much he loved me, for I should have brought him to do a shameful act. And she would remember, whom I had robbed of her husband, coming into his life after he had promised himself to her. Last of all—most of all, perhaps—I myself should remember, day by day, and hour by hour, that I was nothing more than one of the family of thieves.