Again silence, broken only by a faint, dreary sound. Jane was weeping.
“Don’t, for the love of God!” cried Leslie. “Don’t cry, or you’ll make me cry too. Oh, miserable life! why was I ever born into it?” And he moved his hands in the air, as blind Samson might have done amidst the pillars of the temple.
A bird piped three times in the recesses of the wood, three flute-like notes sweet as the notes of a bell-bird. They were answered by its mate in the branches above.
Leslie put his hands to his ears, as if to shut out the happy sounds.
Jane’s tears had ceased, but she did not speak, she did not breathe; only a deep sigh occasionally escaped from her.
“And now, we can only say good-bye. Let us part here for ever. We will meet again in—Heaven,” said Leslie, with a horrible shuddering laugh.
He stretched out his hand and took hers. She let him have it without seeming to know that he had taken it.
She was murmuring his name in a whisper, staring at him and through him, and as if her gaze was fixed on some terrible catastrophe beyond.
“Dick! Dick! Dick!” All poetry could not express the helpless, hopeless sorrow she put into those three little whispered words.
Suddenly, filtering through the wood, came a sound, a voice, a spirit, that unrolled around them a panorama of loch, moor, and sky, hills purple with heather, lakes dark with shadow. “Auld Lang Syne.”