“Those five years are beyond our reach,” he continues. “They are gone never to return, but we can make up for them during the remainder of our lives. And—we will. Will we not?”
“Yes—we will.”
The reply, though low, is full-voiced and unhesitating. Luminous eyes, sweet with their love light, are raised to his, and the man’s head is drawn down to meet again that kiss which seemed to join soul to soul in the dread hour of peril and of bloodshed and self-abnegation. And, with the moment, the long years of desolation and heart-emptiness are as though they had never been—for after the drear gloom of their weary length—the sharp and fiery trial of their culmination, Love has triumphed, and now there is light.
And here with the doings of our two principal characters we have no further concern, and if this holds good of them, still more does it hold good of those among whom their lot has been temporarily cast. But if life, in its fatefulness, has refrained from dashing the cup of happiness—tardily yet finally grasped—from the hands of these two, its normal grimness of irony is not likely to suffer in the long run. For Umar Khan is still at large. Force and diplomacy alike have failed to bring that arch-free-booter and murderer within measurable distance of the gallows and faggot pyre, which he has so richly earned a score of times over. For the twenty-first time the wily evildoer has escaped retribution, and in all probability will continue to do so. Which—if not exactly satisfying to our reader’s sense of poetic justice—is Life.
The End.
| [Chapter 1] | | [Chapter 2] | | [Chapter 3] | | [Chapter 4] | | [Chapter 5] | | [Chapter 6] | | [Chapter 7] | | [Chapter 8] | | [Chapter 9] | | [Chapter 10] | | [Chapter 11] | | [Chapter 12] | | [Chapter 13] | | [Chapter 14] | | [Chapter 15] | | [Chapter 16] | | [Chapter 17] | | [Chapter 18] | | [Chapter 19] | | [Chapter 20] | | [Chapter 21] | | [Chapter 22] | | [Chapter 23] |