! The nightingale is
beginning again."

He sent forth in the dark a fountain--a rising, aspiring fountain--of
golden notes which seemed to reach heaven itself. The night was made
radiant by them. He flung them upward like a shower of stars into
the sky. We sat and listened, almost holding our breath. Oh! the
nightingale! the nightingale!

"He knows," Hector MacNairn's low voice said, "that it was not a dream."

When there was silence again I heard him leave his chair very quietly.

"Good night! good night!" he said, and went away. I felt somehow that
he had left us together for a purpose, but, oh, I did not even remotely
dream what the purpose was! But soon she told me, almost in a whisper.

"We love you very much, Ysobel," she said. "You know that?"

"I love you both, with all my heart," I answered. "Indeed I love you."

"We two have been more to each other than mere mother and son. We have
been sufficient for each other. But he began to love you that first day
when he watched you in the railway carriage. He says it was the far look
in your eyes which drew him."

"I began to love him, too," I said. And I was not at all ashamed or shy
in saying it.

"We three might have spent our lives together," she went on. "It would
have been a perfect thing. But--but--" She stood up as if she could not
remain seated. Involuntarily I stood up with her. She was trembling, and
she caught and held me in her arms. "He cannot stay, Ysobel," she ended.

I could scarcely hear my own voice when I echoed the words.

"He cannot--stay?"

"Oh! the time will come," she said, "when people who love each other
will not be separated, when on this very earth there will be no pain, no
grief, no age, no death--when all the world has learned the Law at
last. But we have not learned it yet. And here we stand! The greatest
specialists have told us. There is some fatal flaw in his heart. At any
moment, when he is talking to us, when he is at his work, when he is
asleep, he may--cease. It will just be ceasing. At any moment. He cannot
stay."

My own heart stood still for a second. Then there rose before me slowly,
but clearly, a vision--the vision which was not a dream.

"Out on the hillside," I murmured. "Out on the hillside."

I clung to her with both arms and held her tight. I understood now why
they had talked about The Fear. These two who were almost one soul
were trying to believe that they were not really to be torn apart--not
really