Читать книгу A Furnace of Earth онлайн

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With one knee on the warped seat, she read again the fading sentences.

“An unknown woman.” Gone down into the cold green depths! Perhaps with a dear, glowing secret in her heart, a one name bubbling from her lips, a new quivering something in her soul, which the waters could not still! That body buffeted and tossed by rearing breakers, to lie nameless in a neglected grave; that soul, its earthly longing forgotten, to go forever unregretful of what it had cried for with all the might of its human passion!

Ah! but did it? If death touched her own soul to-day! “For love is strong as death. * * * Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it!” In imagination she felt the numbing clasp of the dragging under-deeps; she saw her soul wandering, wraith-like, through shadowless, silent spaces and across infinite distances. Would it bear with it a placid joy? Would it know no quicker heart-beat, no tears that reddened the eyelid, no tender thrill in all its lucent veins? Would nothing, nothing of that strange, sweet wildness that ran imprisoned in all her blood cling to it still?