ing
her--and looks once more into her large, tearless eyes. "If life on
earth is done," he says, solemnly, "then in heaven, my soul, we meet
again!"

He lays his lips on hers.

"In heaven, my love, and soon!" returns she, very quietly, and so they
part!

* * * * *

It is but a little half-hour afterwards when they bring him back again,
and lay him gently and in silence upon the wet sand--cold and dead! Some
spar had struck him, they hardly know what, and had left him as they
brought him home.

Many voices are uplifted at this sad return, but all grow hushed and
quiet as a girl with bare head presses her way resolutely through the
crowd, and, moving aside those who would mercifully have delayed her,
having reached her dead, sits down upon the sand beside him, and,
lifting his head in her arms, dank and dripping with sea-foam, lays it
tenderly upon her knees. Stooping over it, she presses it lovingly
against her breast, and with tender fingers smooths back from the pale
forehead the short, wet masses of his dark hair. She is quite calm, her
fingers do not even tremble, but there is a strange, strange look in her
great eyes.

_His_ eyes are closed. No ugly stain of blood mars the beauty of his
face. He lies calm and placid in her embrace, as though wrapt in softest
slumber--but oh! how irresponsive to the touch that once would have
thrilled his every sense with rapture!

There is something so awful in the muteness of her despair, that a
curious hush falls upon those grouped around her--and him. The whole
scene is so fraught with a weird horror, that when one woman in the
background bursts into bitter weeping, she is pushed out of sight, as
though emotion of a demonstrative nature is out of place just here.
Noisy grief can have no part in this hopeless sorrow.

Dicky Browne, bending over her (Roger has taken Dulce home), says:

"Oh, Portia! that it should end like this, and just now--_now_, when
life had opened out afresh for him!" His voice is choked and almost
inaudible. Now that he is gone, they all know how dear he has been to
them, how interwoven with theirs has been his quiet melancholy life.

"I knew it," says Portia, not quickly, but yet with some faint, soft
vehemence. "I am not surprised, I am not grieved." She whispers
something else after this repeatedly, and Dicky, bending lower, hears
the words, "And soon--and soon." She repeats them in an ecstatic
undertone; there