“Sweetheart, God bless you for coming to me at the last,” he went on. “It was grand—intrepid. Tell me, Hilda. You have known all the time that I loved you?”
“Yes, I knew,” she answered chokingly. Then, with forced gaiety, “You did not on the voyage, though.”
“Was I not a born fool? Oh, my darling, what happiness might have been ours. What might not our lives have been but for this?”
A thought of Cynthia Daintree crossed her mind, of Cynthia Daintree amusing herself at Mazaran, while claiming this man’s bond. An impulse came upon her to ask about that affair, but she forebore. Nothing of a disturbing nature must come between them now. And time was so short, so precious.
Then for a short sacred half hour they talked—and their words, uttered on the brink of the grave of one of them, were so deep, so sacred as not to bear intrusion. And then Shere Dil Khan’s voice was heard outside, proclaiming that the time had come for the interview to end.
“We have found our happiness only to lose it,” whispered Raynier. “But that is better than never having known it. Is it not?”
“Yes, yes—a thousand times. God bless you, O my love, my love!”
To the end of her life Hilda will never know how she tore herself from the last close embrace. And Heaven was deaf to the cry of her widowed soul, deaf as the polite but impassive Oriental who conducted her forth from that chamber of heartbreak and despair.