"You sweet, cruel, pitiless torturer," Lilith said, locking her hands in his, as they rose, "you have placed my life under one great lasting shadow, because of the recollection of you. How will it be, think you, when I wake up to-morrow and find you are gone—if I sleep at all that is? How will it be when, day after day, week after week—— Ah, love, love," she broke off, "and yet I cannot say, 'Why did you do it?' for your very cruelty in doing it is sweet—sweet, do you hear, Laurence? Have you ever been loved—tell me, have you, have you?" she went on, drawing his head down with a sort of fierceness and again pressing her burning lips to his.
"At the twelfth hour! at the twelfth hour!" he repeated, in a kind of condemnatory merciless tone, while his clasp tightened around the lovely form, which seemed literally to hang in his arms. "Love of my heart, think what such an hour as this might have been, not once, but again and again, and that undashed with the pain of immediate parting as now. Why did we—why did you—wait until the very twelfth hour? Why?"
"Why, indeed? Darling, darling, don't reproach me. You have drawn my very heart and soul into yours. Think of it ever, day and night, whatever may befall you. Oh, Laurence, my heart's life!"
Now this hard, stony, self-controlled stoic discovered that his granite nature was shaken to its foundation. But, even then, the unutterable sweetness of the thought that he, and he alone, had lived to inspire the anguish of the pleading tones that thrilled to his ear, thrilled with love for him, to enkindle the light that shone from those eyes, melting with love for him; this thought flowed in upon the torrent-wave of his pain, rendering it bliss, yet lashing it up the more fiercely.
There was silence for a few moments. Both stood gazing into each other's eyes; gazing, as it were, into the innermost depths of each other's soul. Then the sound of voices drawing nearer, rising above the clanking hum of the Crown Reef battery, seemed to warn them that if their last farewell was to be made alone the time to make it had come.
"Good-bye, now, love of my heart," he whispered, between long, burning, clinging kisses. Now that this final parting had come, the dead, dreary, heartsick pain of it seemed to choke all utterance.
She strained him to her, and heart throbbed against heart. Even now she seemed to see his face mistily and far away.
"Oh, it is too bitter!" she gasped, striving to drown her rising sobs. "Laurence, my darling! Oh, my love, my life, my ideal—yes, you were that from the moment I first saw you—good-bye—and good-bye!"
He was gone. It was as though their embrace had literally been wrenched asunder. He was gone. And even as he passed from her vision, from the light into the gloom, so it seemed as though he had borne the light of her life with him, and, as Lilith stood there in the open doorway, gazing forth into the night, the dull measured clank of the battery stamps seemed to beat in cruel, pitiless refrain within her heart: