Then it was that he knew, once and for ever, that this was a lie. Then it was that he knew that he was not where he was, suspended between the stars of heaven and the lamps of earth, on June's account. He was there because a gipsy girl had called him. This was his service, not of the pretty and pleasant June he was presently going to marry, but of one whom he had not married, of one he had not feared to compromise, of one who had known nothing, cared nothing, save that she had been lost in a wild and tender and beautiful love. She, none other, had called him——
Then, too, it was that there rose to him from below a faint yet high and shuddering "A-a-a-ah!" that was followed by a sudden cessation of all sound whatever save only a distant throb and pulsing in the Dancing-Hall. It surprised him for a moment; then he remembered. Of course. He had been seen——
She, none other, had called him, and he knew now that so she would continue to call him, wherever he might be—from his labour by day and from his rest by night, from his laughter with his children and his clasping of his wife. She would continue to call him until softness and ease should have done their slow and fatal work, would continue to call him until that nerve, with her harping on it, should have become dull....
He seemed to hear the echoes of that voiceless calling, diminishing through the years to come. They would end in a silence that his wife's innocent garrulity would never, never be able to break——
The faint throb in the Dancing-Hall also ceased. The Kursaal Gardens were a bead mat of faces. There was not a whisper. Delyn was not stiller.
Unconscious that already he was black and torn and bleeding, he looked down from his girder upon the bead mat. He knew what, presently, if he came down alive, every bead there would be singing—his daring and his quixotry and his devotion, and the possession by June of a husband who would do this rather than suffer the lightest breath upon the mirror of her name——
He looked at them as he clung, scarce bigger than a speck, high in that webbed diadem of the Wheel——
And as he hung there, with only the guardian of the Trwyn light higher than he, and the rest of the descent still to make, he still could not decide, of the two things that oppressed his heart, which was the atonement and which the sin.