Just so, just like that curved golden thread, so thin that a few minutes before it had not been to be seen--just so had that tender crescent of his youth held that dim and gibbous and ghostly round of his past. Just so he had been haggardly haunted, but touched with golden innocence in the end. And he himself seemed to me to be peeping into that Tower which I did not enter, as for ages other crescents had peeped when the doves had filled that hollow with their crooning and no other sound had broken the hush of eve. And thenceforward he would always re-visit it, embracing with a gilded edge the whole dark content of man.

But they lay elsewhere. They are not together, but side by side. Alec would not have it otherwise, and Madge did not seem greatly to care.

The parallelism of their fair young bodies is the closing parallelism of this book. On his stone is a discrepancy that commonly pa.s.ses as a carver's error. They lie thus:

JANET AIRD DERWENT ROSE

b. 1903 d. 1920 b. 1875 d. 1920 at the Chateau de Beaumanoir at the same Time and Place aged 17 years aged 16 years

R.I.P.