“You will be brave and true to yourself, Ronald. Do not let me have the smart all my life long of knowing that love for me has led you further from heaven; let it, rather, take you nearer. I have some quaint thoughts, and one is that in another world God makes our lives complete. Perhaps there, in that land where the gates are of jasper and the walls of pearl, we may be together—who knows? Looking to that time, we will forget the darkness and sorrow of this.”
He said to himself, bitterly, that such thoughts might comfort angels and women; they brought no consolation to him.
“You must remember Clarice,” she pleaded; “Clarice, who loves you so well.”
“I remember all. Hermione, if I send for you when I am dying, should it be soon or should it be in twenty years, you will come to me?”
“Yes,” she replied, with a deep-drawn, bitter sob. “I will come, Ronald. Now, farewell.”
She was pure and innocent as the white doves that fed from her hand. She saw no wrong in bending her sweet, sad face over him for that last, most sorrowful embrace.
Once more his lips touched hers, but the chill upon them was the chill of death.
“Good-by, my love, my dear, lost love, good-by,” he said, and the words died away in a moan. Another minute and she had passed out of sight.
When the hour of death came it was not so bitter for him as that in which Hermione Lorriston passed out of his sight. He flung himself on the ground, praying the skies might fall and cover him; that he might never rise to meet the sunlight again.
From that day he was a changed man; he felt it and knew it himself. The quiet, resigned content for which he had been trying so hard was further from him than ever. The resignation arriving from philosophy had forsaken him. Night and day he brooded over the one idea that she had loved him, and he had lost her. Day and night he pondered over the mystery of that letter.