Captain Macedoine's Daughter

For you will not be too much astonished to hear that this girl for whom I had cherished this sterile fidelity had become in all essentials the dream-woman who had been the bane of my life for so long. Perhaps she had always been the same and the illusion of youth had blinded me to her identity. Perhaps, on the other hand, she had really changed, for she was now twenty-five instead of twenty-one--ominous years in a woman's life. At any rate, I had changed for a certainty. While I still struggled against the bondage her personality imposed upon me, I no longer struggled in vain. I had been drawing stores of strength from toil, from the sea, from the bizarre phantasmagoria which the countries of the East had unrolled before my eyes. And I think she saw this at once, for she had no sooner introduced me to her companion, an actor who had recently married an eminent actress twice his own age, than she made our excuses and proposed an immediate departure.

But it