She turned and faced him. “Must I? Alone?” What a depth of desolation in that word!
“There is no other way, dearest one.”
“Good-bye, then, until we meet,” she said in the passionate music of her voice. “Every beat of my heart will bring me nearer to you. There will be no other life for me. Soon or late I’ll come to you. You believe it. Say you believe it!”
“I believe it.” He bent and kissed her lips. Then his form slackened away from the arms that clasped it, and sank into the chair. A policeman’s whistle shrilled outside the window. The faintest flicker of a smile passed over the face of the sleeper.
I took her away, still with that unearthly ecstasy on her face.
The glow of the narrator’s cigar waxed, a pin-point of light in a world of dimness and mystery. Subdued breathing made our silence rhythmic. When I found my voice, it was hardly more than a whisper.
“Good God! What a tragedy!”
“Tragedy? You think it so?” The Little Red Doctor’s gnarled face gleamed strangely behind the tiny radiance. “Dominie, you have a queer notion of this life and little faith in the next.”
“‘She met death as a tryst,’” murmured the old librarian. “And he! Trailing clouds of glory!’ The triumph of that victory over fate! One would like to have seen the meeting between them, after the waiting.”