TO THE LIGHTHOUSEDid she complete what he began? With equalcomplacence she saw his misery, condoned hismeanness, and acquiesced in his torture. Thatdream, then, of sharing, completing, finding insolitude on the beach an answer, was but a reflec-tion in a mirror, and the mirror itself was butthe surface glassiness which forms in quiescencewhen the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient,despairing yet loth to go (for beauty offers herlures, has her consolations), to pace the beach wasimpossible; contemplation was unendurable; themirror was broken.

[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume ofpoems that spring, which had an unexpectedsuccess. The war, people said, had revived theirinterest in poetry.]7

Night after night, summer and winter, thetorment of storms, the arrow-like stillness of fineweather, held their court without interference.Listening (had there been any one to listen) fromthe upper rooms of the empty house only giganticchaos streaked with lightning could have beenheard tumbling and tossing, as the winds andwaves disported themselves like the amorphousbulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced byno light of reason, and mounted one on top of208
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