She was sorry for him, for he seemed to care so much;--and this was the end! She had tried to bear her life. Nobody could imagine how hard she had tried; life had been her punishment, so with all her soul and all her body, she had tried to bear it! But this was the end. It was not possible to try any more. "I have borne it as long as I can," she thought. Yet as she had said, she was not angry. She wondered, vaguely, listening to the dip of the oars, at this absence of anger. She had been able to talk about the bonfires, and she had thought the moon beautiful. No; she was not angry. Or if she were, then her anger was unlike all the other angers that had scourged and torn the surface of her life; they had been storms, all clamor and confusion and blinding flashes, with more or less indifference to resulting ruin. But this anger, which could not be recognized as anger, was a noiseless cataclysm in the very center of her being; a tidal wave, that was lifting and lifting, moving slowly, too full for sound, in the resistless advance of an absorbing purpose of ruin. "I am not angry," she said to herself; "but I think I am dying." The pallor of her face frightened Blair, who was straining at his oars against the current: "Elizabeth! What is the matter? Shall I stop? Shall we go ashore? You are ill!" "No; I'm not. Go on, please." "But there is something the matter!" She shook her head. "Don't stop. We've gone ever so far down-stream, just in this minute." Blair looked at her anxiously. A little later he tried to make her talk; asked her how she felt, and called her attention to the bank of clouds that was slowly climbing up the sky. But she was silent. As usual, she seemed to have nothing to say to him. He rowed steadily, in long, beautiful strokes, and she sat watching the dark water lap and glimmer past the side of the skiff. As they worked up-stream, the sheen of oil began to show again in faint and rocking iridescence; once she leaned over and touched the water with her fingers; then looked at them with a frown. "Look out!" Blair said; "trim a little, will you?" She sat up quickly: "I wonder if it is easy to drown?" "Mighty easy--if you lean too hard on the gunwale," he said, good-naturedly. "Does it take very long?" "To drown? I never tried it, but I believe not; though I understand that it's unpleasant while it lasts." He watched her wistfully; if he could only make her smile! "I suppose dying is generally unpleasant," she said, and glanced down into the black oily water with a shiver. It was quite dark by this time, and Blair was keeping close to the shore to avoid the current narrowing between the piers of the old bridge. When they reached Mrs. Todd's wharf Elizabeth was still staring into the water.