re up at them from a
thousand ruddy eyes. The windows seemed infinite in number, the
streets endless in their complications: yet everything was deserted.
At this hour the streets were empty, and would remain so until
daylight. Not a soul was stirring; no face looked from any of those
myriads of glowing windows; no footfall disturbed the silence of those
asphalt streets. There, almost within call behind those windows, shut
off from those empty streets, a thousand human lives were teeming, each
the centre of its own circle of thoughts and words and actions; and yet
the solitude was profound, the desolation complete, the stillness
unbroken by a single echo.

The night--the last night of the old year--was fine; the white, clear
light from a moon they could not see grew wide and clear over the city,
as the last gleam of the sunset faded. It was just warm enough for the
window to be open, and for nearly three hours Condy and Blix sat
looking down upon the city in these last moments of the passing year,
feeling upon their faces an occasional touch of the breeze, that
carried with it the smell of trees and flowers from the gardens below
them, and the faint fine taint of the ocean from far out beyond the
Heads. But the scene was not in reality silent. At times when they
listened intently, especially when they closed their eyes, there came
to them a subdued, steady bourdon, profound, unceasing, a vast, numb
murmur, like no other sound in all the gamut of nature--the sound of a
city at night, the hum of a great, conglomerate life, wrought out there
from moment to moment under the stars and under the moon, while the
last hours of the old year dropped quietly away.

A star fell.

Sitting in the window, the two noticed it at once, and Condy stirred
for the first time in fifteen minutes.

"That was a very long one," he said, in a low voice. "Blix, you must
write to me--we must write each other often."

"Oh, yes," she answered. "We must not forget each other; we have had
too good a time for that."

"Four years is a long time," he went on. "Lots can happen in four
years. Wonder what I'll be doing at the end of four years? We've had a
pleasant time while it lasted, Blix."

"Haven't we?" she said, her chin on her hand, the moonlight shining in
her little, dark-brown eyes.

Well, he was going to lose her. He had found out that he loved her
only in time to feel the wrench of parting from her all the more
keenly. What