soon now," he continued, "and we'll all
have to go back to work."

"Isn't this work?" Al'mah asked with a smile, which had in it something
of her old whimsical self.

"It ain't play, and it ain't work," he answered with a sage frown of
intellectual effort. "It's a cut above 'em both--that's my fancy."

"It would seem like that," was the response. "What are you going to do
when you get back to England?" she inquired.

"I thought I'd ask you that," he replied anxiously. "Couldn't I be a
scene-shifter or somefink at the opery w'ere you sing?"

"I'm going to sing again, am I?" she asked.

"You'd have to be busy," he protested admiringly.

"Yes, I'll have to be busy," she replied, her voice ringing a little,
"and we'll have to find a way of being busy together."

"His gryce'd like that," he responded.

She turned her face slowly to the evening sky, where grey clouds became
silver and piled up to a summit of light. She was silent for a long
time.

"If work won't cure, nothing will," she said in a voice scarce above a
whisper. Her body trembled a little, and her eyes closed, as though to
shut out something that pained her sight.

"I wish you'd sing somethin'--same as you did that night at Glencader,
about the green hill far away," whispered the little trumpeter from the
bed.

She looked at him for a moment meditatively, then shook her head, and
turned again to the light in the evening sky.

"P'raps she's makin' up a new song," Jigger said to himself.

On a kopje overlooking the place where Ian Stafford had been laid to
sleep to the call of the trumpets, two people sat watching the sun go
down. Never in the years that had gone had there been such silence
between them as they sat together. Words had been the clouds in which
the lightning of their thoughts had been lost; they had been the
disguises in which the truth of things masqueraded. They had not dared
to be silent, lest the truth should stalk naked before them. Silence
would have revealed their unhappiness; they would not have dared to
look closely and deeply into each other's face, lest revelation should
force them to say, "It has been a mistake; let us end it." So they had
talked and talked and acted, and yet had done nothing and been nothing.

Now they were silent, because they had tossed into the abyss of Time
the cup of trembling, and had drunk of the chalice of peace. Over the
grave into which, this day, they had thrown the rock-roses and sprigs
of