Explore "The Marriage of Esther" by Guy Boothby on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If Cuthbert Ellison ever forgets any portion of his eventful career, it will certainly not be the part connected with his sail that evening. The sun lay like a disc of fire upon the horizon's edge as he left the bay; his ruddy glare lit up the sea, the islands, and the cloudless heavens, and the effect grew even more weird and wonderful the further he sank into his crimson bed. Ellison put his boat about and steered directly for the sinking orb, the water churning into foam under the little vessel's bows as he progressed. He seemed hardly conscious of his actions. He sat in the stern-sheets staring straight ahead of him, seeing little or nothing of the sea around him, looking only through his mind's-eye at his home and the momentous event that was occurring there. His own sin and its consequences seemed as nothing to him now in the white light of his new and greater anxiety.
If anything disastrous should befall his wife in his absence, if she should die before he could get back to her, what would happen to him then? In that case the sooner he himself died the better. The very idea of such a thing set him trembling like a leaf. He knew now exactly how much he cared for his wife, and in his present state that knowledge was not a soothing one. He realised what the world, his world, would be to him without her.