As Ding Dong had gone to the city on an errand for Emil and did not return on the usual train in the evening, there was no one at the cottage to pump the organ, for Simon evidently considered it beneath his dignity to perform so menial a service. He sat in a rocking-chair near a window, and from time to time with a meditative eye, he scanned the walls of the room which were decorated with mottoes and lithographs in colours. He was estimating the probable cost of replacing the partition when Emil should have finished with the cottage. The inventor, restless and keenly disappointed, went again and again to the outer door, where he remained straining his eyes through the salty darkness, though there was no chance now that Ding Dong would appear until morning. Rachel sat by a little table turning over the leaves of a current magazine with her long fingers; she was impatient with her husband and whenever Emil entered the room, she looked at him, and her face between the loopings of her hair, had a faint, remote, mysterious smile. Annie issued from the kitchen and going up to Emil leaned against his shoulder, and he nonchalantly encircled her little figure. Instantly, Rachel grew hot all over with a violent jealousy such as she had never before experienced. All the way home while she walked by Simon's side and felt beneath her elbow his thin fingers supporting her, her hands beneath her cloak were pressed against her heart. Oh, the intensity of her love and the paleness of his! She had a picture of Life irrevocably linked to Death. With the vision came such a sense of desolation that, turning her face aside, she sobbed under her breath. The miracle was rapidly accomplishing; she was passing out of herself,--out of her scruples, her pity, her fears. She was wandering on the sands and knew not where she went, save that the need for movement was imperative. She had left Gray Arches far behind. What matter that from the dun-coloured clouds a slant of rain descended, straight and fine as the locks a princess engaged in combing her hair? Secretly, noiselessly, the rain touched the sands, save at intervals when a land breeze seized it; then these liquid tresses were torn and tangled into drifting masses as by the hand of a rude lover who violently seizes the locks of his mistress. And the rain hissed as it met the sands and ran away in little curling, twisting rivulets like serpents. Enjoying the caress of the moisture on her face, Rachel walked on. The vigour of her childhood was in her limbs, the spirit of it in her heart, and she remembered her old turbulent longing for freedom. But love was the supreme liberator. And in an ecstasy, she drew herself together and her craving for this supposed liberation of the spirit was so intense and penetrating, that she wavered uncertainly as if about to fall.