son why you should get the best you can
out of yourself. I'll give you a reason. Judith is a reason. Austin is
a reason. I'm a reason. I am never going to let you go. Judith can't
be the one to help you get through the best you can, even though it
may not be so very well--poor, poor Judith, who would die to be able
to help you! Mother wasn't allowed to. She wanted to, I see that now.
But I can. I'm not a thousandth part as strong or as good as they; but
if we hang together! All my life is going to be settled for me in a
few hours. I don't know how it's going to be. But however it is, you
will always be in my life. For as long as you live," she caught her
breath at the realization of how little that phrase meant, "for as
long as you live, you are going to be what you wanted to be, what you
ought to have been, my brother--my mother's son."

He clung to her hand, he clung to it with such a grip that her fingers
ached--and she blessed the pain for what it meant.

CHAPTER XLVII

"... AND ALL THE TRUMPETS SOUNDED!"

They had told her at the farm, the old man and the old woman who had
looked so curiously at her, that Mr. Page had gone on up the wood-road
towards the upper pasture. He liked to go there sometimes, they said,
to look at the sunset from a big rock that stood in the edge of the
white birch woods. They added, in extenuation of this, that of course
somebody had to go up there anyhow, once in a while, to salt the
sheep.

Sylvia had passed on, passed the great, square, many-chimneyed house,
passed the old-fashioned garden, and struck into the wood-road beyond
the bars. The sun was so low now, almost below the edge of the Notch,
that the rays were level and long behind her. So she had walked,
bathed in luminous gold at Versailles, on the day when Austin had
first told her that he loved her, on the day she had told him the
truth. From the first moment she had seen him how he had always
brought out from her the truest and best, finer and truer than
anything she had thought was in her, like a reflection from his own
integrity. His eyes that day, what clear wells of loyalty and honor
... how her mother would have loved him! And that other day, when he
said farewell and went away to his ordeal ... she closed her eyes for
an instant, pierced with the recollection of his gaze on her! What was
she, what poor thing transfigured to divinity, that such passion, such
tenderness had been hers ... even for a moment ...