The Argosy — page 166: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

154 By the Sad Sea Waves. Ottalie stops to speak. ‘‘ Deborah, don’t! please, don’t We must stay here. It is a safe retreat; no one knows it. I—sometimes I fear I am not a good woman ; that you know I am not. I am afraid to risk temptation again. Sometimes I wonder whether, if A4e”—her voice sinks, and she turns her pale, thin face towards me—“ if he were to find me and ask me the same.-thing, I should have the strength to say no again. Oh, my mother, if yqu were but living now!” she adds, clasping her hands, and taking up her weary tramp again. It is the first time she -has.alluded to Jasper Daine. The thought exasperates me. I must be getting ill-tempered out of sheer weariness. “I warned you in time, Ottalie. Did I not tell you how it must end?” “Yes, I know all that; it is no one’s fault but mine,” she answers, as her eyes wander out seaward again. The eyes have dark circles perpetually now, and her pretty face has lost its bloom. As a gust of wind lifts her hair I see how sharpened its outline has become. How dreary this is! And, what is drearier still, every day brings us nearer to that of Captain Joyce’s release. And then? Will he find us here? Will she die of it? Oh, Ottalie, Ottalie! If I am cross, it is for her sake. To and fro still she tramps. I sit on, with my despair, and watch the smoke from the coastguard cottage chimneys curl up against the grey sky, and the last leaves from the solitary row of poplar-trees fall off in the wintry wind. And this is our life. How long will it last? I ask the question of myself as the faint, red sun gleams out for a moment beyond the lighthouse, and then sinks to its rest ; sinks, only to rise again on the morrow, to rise and set on many countless to-morrows. How long? How long? The sea-gulls flap into shore, screeching angrily, and the waves, the sad sea waves, come creeping in slowly over the sands, with a sad, sullen moan, in and in, until the faint colour left by the sun is gone, and night is upon us, And all night long I lie on my pillow and listen to the waves, and cannot sleep. The morning brings a letter. A letter for us! Only one individual in the wide world, so far as I know, is cognisant of our address: the friendly old lawyer, once a relative of my dead mother’s, through whom we get our small income transmitted periodically. What can he have to say? It is:only the middle of the-quarter. Ottalie, seated opposite to me at the breakfast-table, glances at it with some faint curiosity. . “Old Weston must have ‘gone in early,” she remarks, alluding to the distant post-town. “ He had to fetch something betimes for the lighthouse.” The letter is addressed to me, and I open it, As I glancé,at its comicbooks.com