When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in
the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.
"When you sing I can see those stars," he said. "Do you understand?"
She bent down.
"I don't know--I don't think I understand anything," she whispered.
"But--I'll try--I'll try to live."
Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible
he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water and
sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.
And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken only
by the faint voices of the fishermen's bells, and said to herself again
and again, like a wondering child:
"There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!"
EPILOGUE
IN London during the ensuing winter people warmly discussed, and many of
them warmly condemned, a certain Italian episode, in which a woman and a
man, once well-known and, in their very different ways, widely popular in
Society, were the actors.
In the deep autumn Sir Donald Ulford had died rather suddenly, and it was
found in his will that he had left his newly-acquired property, Casa
Felice, to Lady Holme, who--as everybody had long ago discovered--was
already living there in strict retirement, while her husband was amusing
himself in various Continental towns. This legacy was considered by a
great number of persons to be "a very strange one;" but it was not this
which caused the gossip now flitting from boudoir to boudoir and from
club to club.
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