Chapter CXIV: Book XI: The Torture-House

_They sat in the darkness, watching where the starlight gleamed upon the water.

“We had always hope,” she was saying. “How endlessly we hoped!”

“Could we do it now?” he asked; and after a pause, he quoted from the poem--

“Unbreachable the fort
Of the long-batter’d world uplifts its wall;
And strange and vain the earthly turmoil grows,
And near and real the charm of thy repose,
And night as welcome as a friend would fall!”_