m Rufus on my lap."

"I'll bet you anything I can," said Martin.

"Oh, no, you can't," I said.

"Have it as you like, bogh, but sing it for all," said Martin, and then
I sang--

_"Oh, Sally's the gel for me,
Our Sally's the gel for me,
I'll marry the gel that I love best,
When I come back from sea."_

But that arrow of memory had been sharpened on Time's grindstone and it
seemed to pierce through us, so Martin proposed that we should try the
rollicking chorus which the excursionists had sung on the
pleasure-steamer the night before.

He did not know a note of music and he had no more voice than a
corn-crake, but crushing up on to the music-stool by my side, he banged
away with his left hand while I played with my right, and we sang
together in a wild delightful discord--

_"Ramsey town, Ramsey town, smiling by the sea,
Here's a health to my true love, wheresoe'er she be."_

We laughed again when that was over, but I knew I could not keep it up
much longer, and every now and then I forgot that I was in my boudoir
and seemed to see that lonesome plateau, twelve thousand feet above the
icy barrier that guards the Pole, and Martin toiling through blizzards
over rolling waves of snow.

Towards midnight we went out on to the balcony to look at the lightning
for the last time. The thunder was shaking the cliffs and rolling along
them like cannon-balls, and Martin said:

"It sounds like the breaking of the ice down there."

When we returned to the room he told me he would have to be off early in
the morning, before I was out of bed, having something to do in
Blackwater, where "the boys were getting up a spree of some sort."

In this way he rattled on for some minutes, obviously talking himself
down and trying to prevent me from thinking. But the grim moment came at
last, and it was like the empty gap of time when you are waiting for the
whirring of the clock that is to tell the end of the old year and the
beginning of the new.

My cuckoo clock struck twelve. Martin looked at me. I looked at him. Our
eyes fell. He took my hand. It was cold and moist. His own was hot and
trembling.

"So this is . . . the end," he said.

"Yes . . . the end," I answered.

"Well, we've had a jolly evening to finish up with, anyway," he said. "I
shall always remember it."

I tried to say he would soon have other evenings to think about that
would make him forget this one.

"Never in this world!"