stamina, to face and command
life, he was serene at the threat of death.

Suddenly hungry, he went into the dining-room and removed the napkins,
turned the electricity into the percolator. Then, with a key from
under the edge of the cloth on a console-table, he opened a door of
the sideboard, and produced a tall dark bottle of Marquis de Riscal
wine, and methodically drew the cork. Charles Abbott wiped the glass
throat and, seated, poured out a goblet full of the translucent
crimson liquid. It brought a slight flush to his cheeks, a light in
his eyes, and the shadow of a vital humor, a past challenge, to his
lips. He had lifted many toasts in that vintage, his glass striking
with a clear vibration against other eagerly held glasses. More often
than not they--Tirso, the guardsman in statue, Remigio, Jaime, Andres
and himself--had drunk to La Clavel. He drank to her, probably the
sole repository of her memory, her splendor, on earth, now. "La
Clavel," he said her name aloud. And then, "Andres."

A sharp gladness seized him that Andres had, almost at the last, heard
his voice, his shouted warning and apprehension and love. If liberty,
justice, were to come, one life, two, could make no difference; a
hundred years, a hundred hundred, were small measures of time. And if
all were doomed, impossible, open to the knife of a fateful Pilar,
why, then, they had had their companionship, their warmth, a period of
unalloyed fidelity to a need that broke ideals like reeds. Perhaps
what they had found was, after all, within them, that for which they
had swept the sky.

THE END

* * * * *

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