DIANA was still very ill. They found it necessary to keep her perfectly quiet. The old wound, never fully healed, had given her much pain of late. Mental excitement at the picnic and her fall had produced feverish symptoms. Her physician had fears which he hardly ventured to express; which he hardly dared formulate, even to himself. She had aroused herself enough during the day to send a kind message by Clara to Dunstan, and to ask that they would write to Miss Sullivan to come on. A letter to that lady would go by the morning mail to Boston.  
Dunstan was in an agony of suspense. During the day, he tried to distract his fixed madness of thought by training Pallid over the beach. The other men were also out on the beach or the road. Bets were nearly even on Pallid, Knockknees, and Nosegay. Toward evening, Dunstan mounted his own horse and galloped off up the island. The wild sunset and windy drift of torn, black clouds was such a mood of nature as suited the terror at his heart. It was a night like this when, in Texas, he had started from San Antonio to ride sixty miles[234] across the country and catch his train. There were such stormy masses of weird clouds, so flashed through by an August moon, so floating at midnight, when, as he dashed along the trail, shouting in savage exhilaration, all the wildness of his nature bursting forth in mad songs and chants of Indian war, suddenly his trusty horse, who had borne him thousands of miles in safety by night and day, over deserts of dust and wastes of snow, fell with him, on him, crushing him terribly. And then, by just such fitful gleams of moonlight, he had dragged himself desolately along, with unbroken limbs, but mangled and bleeding—dragged himself whither he saw a midnight lamp, as of one who watched the sick or the dead. And near the spot whence the light came, he had sunk voiceless, fainting, dying, until he was awakened by a tender touch upon his brow, and saw bending over him, in the clear quiet of midnight, Diana, who had found at last and was to save her Endymion: Diana, from that moment to become the passion of his every instinct, the love of every thought.
 
But now, now it was she who was the wounded, the fainted, the dying. O God! he could not think of this despair, and he cried aloud and galloped on furiously. The drift of wild black clouds followed him as he rode and met him more gloomily as he returned.
 
He could not rest, and soon resumed his sentinel[235] tramp along the shore. There for hours he walked, the breakers counting his moments drearily. The horizon all to seaward was a black line, and over it the sky was lurid blankness; it did not tempt the voyaging hope to circle ocean, chasing distant dawn. He could not seek a refuge for his miserable hopelessness in that reasoning with the infinite called prayer. Was it to make him happy or content that men, questioning the infinite and receiving for all answer, “Mystery!” had essayed for themselves to interpret this dim oracle and had feigned to find that sorrows and agonies are strengthening blessings? So the happy and the placid say: so say not the lonely and bereaved. Pain is an accursed wrong, for all our self-beguiling and self-flattery in its lulls.
 
This was a man of thorough, tested manhood. There was no experience that educates the body and the mind which he had not proved. All this preparation was done; he was facing the duties of his full manhood. And now that was to happen, that sorrow he knew must come, which would make every effort joyless, every achievement a vanity, every belief a doubt, every day sick for its coming night of darkness, and every morn sad for its uninvited dawning and eager for speedy night.
 
As he moved along the shore, he was aware again, as on the previous night, of a shadow lurking in the dimness.
 
[236]“Possibly a mischief-maker,” he thought, and half-concealing himself, he waited to watch. The figure approached—a man. He stepped forward to meet him in the moonlight.
 
“Paulding!”
 
“Dunstan!”
 
The two friends had not met since the picnic. Paulding knew, only as everyone now knew, that his friend and Diana were engaged. He therefore could conceive why there was one night wanderer by the shore. In a few passionate words, he told Dunstan his own secret—the secret of his sorrowful unrest. He, too, loved Diana.
 
“My dear friend,” said Dunstan tenderly, as the other sobbed and was silent, “I have seemed almost a traitor to you and if I could have dreamed of this, I would have even violated my pledge to tell you before what I now can tell permittedly. I was too busy with my own happiness in recovering Diana to think of any other man or woman.”
 
“Recovering her?” repeated Paulding. “Then you had already met——”
 
“Yes,” said Dunstan, and recounted the incident of his night ride from San Antonio and his fall. “Diana went out upon the lawn,” he continued, “to study the moon, her emblem. She heard my moans. The noble woman was living there alone with her mother, once ruined and mad, and now dying. Her whole household consisted of a few negroes and[237] two or three Mexican servants. When I awoke from my fainting fit and found her stooping over me, I knew in that moment that she was to be the ............