and the sound, very faint, came stealing
when they were silent--swelling, sinking, festive, mournful; having a
far-off life of its own, like the flickering fire-flames before which
they lay embraced, or the lilies delicate between the candles. Listening
to that music, tracing with his finger the tiny veins on her breast, he
lay like one recovering from a swoon. No parting. None! But sleep, as
the firelight sleeps when flames die; as music sleeps on its deserted
strings.

And the girl watched him.

It was nearly ten when he bade her go to bed. And after she had gone
obedient into the bedroom, he brought ink and paper down by the fire. The
drifter, the unstable, the good-for-nothing--did not falter. He had
thought, when it came to the point, he would fail himself; but a sort of
rage bore him forward. If he lived on, and confessed, they would shut
him up, take from him the one thing he loved, cut him off from her; sand
up his only well in the desert. Curse them! And he wrote by firelight
which mellowed the white sheets of paper; while, against the dark
curtain, the girl, in her nightgown, unconscious of the cold, stood
watching.

Men, when they drown, remember their pasts. Like the lost poet he had
"gone with the wind." Now it was for him to be true in his fashion. A
man may falter for weeks and weeks, consciously, subconsciously, even in
his dreams, till there comes that moment when the only thing impossible
is to go on faltering. The black cap, the little driven grey man looking
up at it with a sort of wonder--faltering had ceased!

He had finished now, and was but staring into the fire.

"No more, no more, the moon is dead,
And all the people in it;
The poppy maidens strew the bed,
We'll come in half a minute."

Why did doggerel start up in the mind like that? Wanda! The weed-flower
become so rare he would not be parted from her! The fire, the candles,
and the fire--no more the flame and flicker!

And, by the dark curtain, the girl watched.

X

Keith went, not home, but to his club; and in the room devoted to the
reception of guests, empty at this hour, he sat down and read the report
of the trial. The fools had made out a case that looked black enough.
And for a long time, on the thick soft carpet which let out no sound of
footfall, he paced up and down, thinking. He might see the defending
counsel, might surely do that as an expert who thought