in your hands. They
can't harm you. Keep them. They are my grave."

"Stephen, rouse yourself! You are alive! you've got to live," said
Talbot desperately, shaking him by the shoulder. "I am going now to
bring men back with me to help you home. You've got to live till I
return, do you hear?"

Stephen had turned from him again and put his arms round the motionless
form before them.

"They are coming nearer," Talbot heard him mutter; "but they shall burn
through me first, little one;" and he stretched himself across the
corpse as if to shield it from the approaching flames, and far off the
red eyes of the planets sank nearer the horizon, but still seemed to
watch them across the snowy waste.

Talbot felt the only one thin thread of hope was to go as fast as his
fatigue-clogged feet could move up to the cabins, and he rose and faced
the homeward trail. He felt the hope of saving Stephen was just the
least faintest flicker that ever burned within a heart; still there was
the chance--the chance that, even should he be already in the sleep that
ends in death when he returned, they could rouse him from it and drag
him into life again. He forced his heavy feet along, and with a great
effort started into a run. His limbs felt like lead, and all his body
like paper. The long hours of cold and fatigue, the excitement, the rush
of changing emotions he had gone through, had been draining his
vitality, but he called upon all that he had left and put it all into
the effort to save his friend. He knew that any one second lost or
gained might be the one to turn the balance of life or death, and he
urged himself forward till a dull pain filled all his side, and his
temples seemed bursting, and the great lights before him swam in a
blood-red mist.

Stephen, left alone, raised his head and gazed round him once, then he
laid his cheek down on the cold cheek, pressed his lips to the cold
lips, and his breast upon the cold breast just over where the bullet had
ploughed its way through the flesh and bone. The night gripped him
tighter and tighter, and slowly he sank to sleep.

_L'ENVOI._

Noontide in June. A sky of the clearest, palest azure, and a rollicking,
swelling, tumbling sea, full of smooth billowy waves chasing each other
over its deep green surface--waves with their white crests blown
backwards, throwing their spray high in the air and seeming to laugh and
call to each other in gurgling voices; and between sea and sky