Magdalena, who loved Nature and had yielded to its influence many times in her life, made a deliberate attempt to absorb the peace and beauty of the night into her own scarred and troubled soul. But she gave up the attempt in a few moments. The fierceness of her mood had passed, and some of its blackness, but she was still bitter and hopeless. There was nothing to do but to face the problem of her life, and thinking was easier on these altitudes, where the air was fresh and salt, and the stars seemed close, than in the ill-ventilated prison which she called her home. She determined to remain until morning and to restore her brain to its normal condition, if possible. She looked back upon the mental and moral inertia into which she had sunken during the past month, and its sequence of morbid and criminal instinct, with terror and horror. Before an hour had passed, she had herself in hand once more, for she had deliberately forced herself to face her own soul, and she believed that she could put her character together again and accept the future without further luxation or debility of will. But she made no attempt to close her eyes to the ugly fact that in that future of interminable years there were only two small stars of hope; and it required an effort of imagination to drag them above the horizon,--her father's death and the return of Trennahan. Her father belonged to a long-lived race, and Trennahan during an absence of three years and some months had given no indication that he remembered her existence; moreover, he had gone into exile for love of another woman. But without the faint white twinkle of those stars the future would be not a blank, but an infernal abyss, which Magdalena, without the society of her kind, without talent, without occupation, without religion, refused to contemplate. And she had all a woman's capacity for fooling herself with the will-o'-the-wisps of the imagination. Her eyes had been clear and her logic relentless so long as the man had been within sight and touch, but his absence, combined with his abrupt and final eviction from the toils of the other woman, had lifted him from practical life into the realms of the imagination; in other words, he was no longer so much a man as an ideal,--a soul whom her own soul was free to await or pursue in that inner world where realities are bodiless and forgotten.