He repeated that call from the verandas; possibly she had not gone far; she might hear. He lighted a great lamp in the glass tower. She would perhaps see the lamp and return.
A white note lay on the floor. He seized it. “Good-bye” was written on it.
“Good-bye! Good-bye!” Not for him those words!
He held the letters far from him and looked at them. “Good-bye!”
Rondah’s writing. Rondah’s paper, with the crown in the corner. She had written on it “Good-bye!”
Staggering to a chair, Regan sat before the ash-covered hearth and crushed the white ghost of love in his powerful hand. The cold was creeping all around him; he noted it not; a worse chill was on his heart. He was fighting against human suspicion with the remembrance of human love!
There it was to condemn her. “Good-bye!”
In his heart was untold misery, but in his long life he had gained in many things more than human wisdom.
“It looks like treachery! It looks like desertion!” he admitted; “but in thirty-three hopeless years on Earth she did not forget me! Can she forget in a day here! A doom—that was what Father Renaudin called it. It could not be averted. It was to fall on Rondah; this has fallen on me!”
“Good-bye! Good-bye!”