th and life. He was dying in loneliness. He was perishing in
the outer dark, where no hand might reach and no voice console. He had
believed--or thought he believed--in God. But now his faith was wearing
very thin. Very soon it would crumble quite away, just as he himself was
crumbling into the dreadful silence of the ages. His life--the brief
passion called life--was over. Out of the dark it had come; into the
dark it went. And no one to care--no one to cry farewell to him across
that desolation of emptiness that was death! No one to kneel beside him
and pray for light in that awful, all-encompassing dark!

Stay! Something had touched him even then. Or was it but his dying
fancy? Red lips he had kissed and that had kissed him in return, eager
arms that had clung and clung, eyes of burning adoration! Did they truly
belong all to the past? Or were they here beside him even now--even now?
Had he wandered backwards perchance into that strange, sweet heaven of
love from which he had been so suddenly and terribly cast out? Ah, how
he had loved her! How he had loved her! Very faintly there began to stir
within him the old fiery longing that she, and she alone, had ever waked
within him. He would worship her to the last flicker of his dying soul.
But the darkness was spreading, spreading, like a yawning of a great
gulf at his feet. Already he was slipping over the edge. The light was
fading out of his sky.

It was the last dim instinct of nature that made him reach out a
groping hand, and with lips that would scarcely move to whisper, "Puck!"

He did not expect an answer. The things of earth were done with. His
life was passing swiftly, swiftly, like the sands running out of a
glass. He had lost her already, and the world had sunk away, away, with
all warmth and light and love.

Yet out of the darkness all suddenly there came a voice, eager,
passionate, persistent. "I am here, Billikins! I am here! Come back to
me, darling! Come back!"

He started at that voice, started and paused, holding back as it were on
the very verge of the precipice. So she was there indeed! He could hear
her sobbing breath. There came to him the consciousness of her hands
clasping his, and the faintest, vaguest glow went through his ice-cold
body. He tried, piteously weak as he was, to bend his fingers about
hers.

And then there came the warmth of her lips upon them, kissing them with
a fierce passion of tenderness, drawing them close as if to b