nt across him, and
her tears fell on his forehead.

"Forgive!" she whispered; "love me!"

He raised his finger, and touched her cheek.

For an hour or more he did not speak, though once or twice he moaned, and
faintly tightened his pressure on her fingers. The storm had died away,
but very far off the thunder was still muttering.

His eyes opened once more, rested on her, and passed beyond, into that
abyss dividing youth from age, conviction from conviction, life from
death.

At the foot of the bed Dawney stood covering his face; behind him
Dominique knelt with hands held upwards; the sound of Greta's breathing,
soft in sleep, rose and fell in the stillness.

XXIX

One afternoon in March, more than three years after Mr. Treffry's death,
Christian was sitting at the window of a studio in St. John's Wood. The
sky was covered with soft, high clouds, through which shone little gleams
of blue. Now and then a bright shower fell, sprinkling the trees, where
every twig was curling upwards as if waiting for the gift of its new
leaves. And it seemed to her that the boughs thickened and budded under
her very eyes; a great concourse of sparrows had gathered on those
boughs, and kept raising a shrill chatter. Over at the far side of the
room Harz was working at a picture.

On Christian's face was the quiet smile of one who knows that she has
only to turn her eyes to see what she wishes to see; of one whose
possessions are safe under her hand. She looked at Harz with that
possessive smile. But as into the brain of one turning in his bed grim
fancies will suddenly leap up out of warm nothingness, so there leaped
into her mind the memory of that long ago dawn, when he had found her
kneeling by Mr. Treffry's body. She seemed to see again the dead face,
so gravely quiet, and furrowless. She seemed to see her lover and
herself setting forth silently along the river wall where they had first
met; sitting down, still silent, beneath the poplar-tree where the little
bodies of the chafers had lain strewn in the Spring. To see the trees
changing from black to grey, from grey to green, and in the dark sky long
white lines of cloud, lighting to the south like birds; and, very far
away, rosy peaks watching the awakening of the earth. And now once
again, after all that time, she felt her spirit shrink away from his; as
it had shrunk in that hour, when she had seemed hateful to herself. She
remembered the words she had s