"The chances were against that. And if I had, it would have still been better that you should be away ... for you. I would have come to you after death, really a spirit then, and lived ever after in your soul."

I put my arms round her, living, warm, beautiful, in the flesh.

"What a lonely, terrible year for you!" I said. "It never occurred to me ... I never dreamed ... and I can't understand now...."

"You remember the night I came back from Lawton's place to you? ...

You were mad with jealous rage, and I am so little accustomed to resist you.... Well, it was my punishment for even thinking I could leave you.... At least, I have always accepted it as such."

"I can never, never forgive myself."

"I knew you would take it like that, and now you see I can make you soon forget it. If you had felt like this for weeks and months it would almost have killed you."

She played with my hair and her lips touched my eyebrows.

"Yes," she answered, looking back at me sadly and closely. "Are you sorry?"

"No, I am not sorry," I answered savagely.

"I thought you would not be."

"Are you?"

She sighed.

"I hardly know. It was so like you, Trevor, such a very, very beautiful boy, exactly like you in miniature. I loved it, of course; I could not help it, but it is better as it is, better that it should die. We could not foresee how it would grow up, and so many men, the majority, are such monsters, such cruel fiends, it is really a crime to bring one into the world."

I was silent, thinking over that wonderful devotion and courage she had shewn me. Of all the solutions to the problem of her flight from me, this had never presented itself to my mind. We are taught both by tradition and experience how most women cling to their lover at such a time. Though indifferent, even faithless to him in their beauty and health, they come to him then for protection, for a.s.sistance. For their name's sake, to save their conventional honour, they will even accept marriage with one they no longer love, or force themselves on one they know has no longer love for them.

But how different this one, as always, had been! To preserve inviolate the spirit of our love, she had gone forward to meet what must to a sensitive nature like hers have been a time of horror and terror, absolutely alone, unsupported except by the thought that I was away, free, unable to share her misery!

With gifts in both hands she had come to me and laid them all in mine.

Then, when I had broken my trust and brought distress upon her, when she was in need and I could have been the one to give, she had fled away from love, from consolation, from any return or reparation.

Proud, courageous, independent, untamable, as she had always been, she was in comparison with other women as a lioness is to a gazelle.

I folded my arms round her tighter at these thoughts, for the lioness was mine and I owned her.

Perhaps, after all, it was worth while to suffer that agony of self-reproach I had just now, and was suffering still, to see put in such shining light before me her courage and her worth.

This was a white night, surely, as the others had been coloured, for as white is the blending of all the colours into one, so in this night all the emotions of those previous nights were blended. Pa.s.sion, jealousy, triumph, and an agony like death had all swept over me in these few short hours, and now from them all, blent together and burning as metals in a smelter, rose up the extreme white vivid flame of love for her like the white silken tongue of fire, the last degree of fiercest heat that the smelter can produce.

I bent over her, looking down into her eyes, deep down into those living depths where I seemed to see the rays of an eternal heaven, clasping the smooth breast to me, closely, that its pa.s.sionate heart-beats might answer my own, and in our veins burnt that intense white flame that melts into itself the glory of the immortal Spirit, the wonder of the hereafter, and all the joys of the world.

By Victoria Cross

Five Nights

Life's Shop Window

Anna Lombard

Six Women

Six Chapters of a Man's Life

The Woman Who Didn't

To-morrow?

Paula

A Girl of the Klondike

The Religion of Evelyn Hastings

Life of my Heart