"What is it? What has happened?" she forced her stiffened tongue to ask him. "Oh, Alan! tell me! You are not ill——"
"Not ill!" came from the twisted mouth, wrung and convulsed with—was it joy or anguish? He shut his eyes, striving for calmness and coherent speech and wrestling with a fierce emotion that made him sway and totter like a drunken man. "Give me your hand—both your dear hands! Don't mind my shutting my eyes—it'll steady me to tell you! ... Just now—when you let go of me—something happened—and I—saw!"
He choked upon the last word. She faced him, white and wild and desperate, and cried in a voice quite strange to Sherbrand's ears:
"You saw! ... My God!—do you want to drive me crazy? Do you mean—you can't mean——"
"Does the truth sound so insane?" His voice broke in a sob. He opened the shut, quivering lids through which the tears were streaming, and the grey-blue eyes that looked at her were no longer the dead orbs of one blind. Life and light throbbed in their depths, they glowed with such a radiance as the eyes of the First Lover may have shed on the face of the new-made Eve. What was he saying in shaken tones of mingled awe and rapture:
"I saw what I am seeing now. Trees—and green grass, and blue sky—and your face! Your dear face that stayed with me when the Big Dark blotted out the rest.... More loving—more lovely than ever I have dreamed it. Oh! Pat, did ever any man get such a wedding-present?" His tone changed: "My sight for me—and death for that poor chap there! Can it be Carpenter—the American who's been so good to me! ... And the priest helping to lift him—the old man with the noble face? ... Not Monseigneur—our Chaplain at the Hospital! He's beckoning! Come! Let's run!"
So these happy lovers with Death as travelling-companion drove away from the City of the Salient. There was a wedding next morning at the Hospital of Pophereele. And twenty-four hours later, the big black-capitalled broadsheets bellowed from Ludgate Hill up Fleet Street and along the Strand to Charing Cross, and all through the West End:
ROMANTIC SEQUEL TO FAMOUS AVIATOR'S STORY. SHERBRAND OF THE R.F.C., BLINDED IN AIR-BATTLE, RECOVERS SIGHT THROUGH SHELL-SHOCK. MARRIED YESTERDAY. RETURNS WITH BRIDE. CAPTAINCY AND D.S.O."
A closing picture of a young couple sitting very close together on a rustic seat in the garden of a cottage on Seasheere Downs, where hyacinths bloom, and clumps of pink-white peonies, and the Birds of War whirr overhead in a June's sky of speedwell-blue.
Patrine Sherbrand says to her husband, as the smoke of British transports and heavily-laden supply-steamers slants against the east horizon, and the knife-sharp bows of shepherding Destroyers cleave the grey-green waters of the North Sea: