Waking
WHEN Maggie was goo sleep, Stephen, weary too with his unaced amount of rowing and with the intense inward life of the last twelve hours, but too restless to sleep, walked and lounged about the deck, with his cigar, far on into midnight, not seeing the dark water - hardly scious there were stars - living only in the near and distant future. At last fatigue quered restlessness, and he rolled himself up in a piece of tarpauling on the deear Maggies feet. She had fallen asleep before nine, and had been sleeping for six hours before the fai hint of a midsummer daybreak was disible. She awoke from that vivid dreaming which makes the margin of our deeper rest. She was in a boat on the wide water with Stephen, and ihering darkness something like a star appeared, that grew and grew till they saw it was the Virgied in St Oggs boat, and it came nearer and ill they saw the Virgin was Lud the boatman hilip - no, not Philip, but her brother, who rowed past without looking at her; and she rose to stretch out her arms and call to him, and their own boat turned over with the movement and they began to sink, till with one spasm of dread she seemed to awake and find she was a child again in the parlour at evening twilight, and Tom was not really angry. From the soothed sense of that false waking she passed to the real waking, to the plash of water against the vessel, and the sound of a footstep on the deck, and the awful starlit sky. There was a moment of utter bewilderment before her mind could get disentangled from the fused web of dreams; but soon the whole terrible truth urged itself upon her. Stephen was not by her now: she was aloh her own memory and her own dread. The irrevocable wrong that must blot her life had been itted - she had brought sorrow into the lives of others - into the lives that were knit up with hers by trust and love. The feeling of a few short weeks had hurried her into the sins her nature had most recoiled from - breach of faith and cruel selfishness; she had rent the ties that had given meaning to duty, and had made herself an outlawed soul with no guide but the wayward choice of her own passion. And where would that lead her? - where had it led her now? She had said she would rather die than fall into that temptation. She felt it now - now that the sequences of such a fall had e before the outward act was pleted. There was at least this fruit from all her years of striving after the highest a - that her soul, though betrayed, beguiled, ensnared, could never deliberately sent to a choice of the lower. And a choice of what? O God - not a choice of joy - but of scious cruelty and hardness; for could she ever cease to see before her Lud Philip with their murdered trust and hopes? Her life with Stephen could have no saess: she must for ever sink and wander vaguely, driven by uain impulse; for she had let go the clue of life - that clue whi the far off years her young need had clutched sly. She had renounced all delights then, before she khem, before they had e within her reach: Philip had been right wheold her that she knew nothing of renunciation: she had thought it was quiet ecstasy; she saw it face to faow - that sad patient living strength which holds the clue of life, and saw that the thorns were for ever pressing on its brow. That yesterday which could never be revoked - if she could exge it now for ah of inward silent endurance she would have bowed beh that cross with a sense of rest.
Daybreak came an