id.

No answer.

"Choose."

She cowered in his arms. He looked at the little hand once more, no
longer limp but clenched against his breast. And he knew that the end
was close at hand, and he spoke again, forcing her to her victory.

"Dearest, you must choose--"

"Garry!"

"Between those others--and me--"

She shrank out of his arms, turned with a sob, swayed, and sank on her
knees beside the bed, burying her head in her crossed arms.

This was her answer; and with it he went away into the darkness,
reeling, groping, while every pulse in him hammered ironic salutation to
the victor who had loved too well to win. And in his whirling brain
sounded the mocking repetition of his own words: "Nothing is lost
through love! Nothing is lost--nothing--nothing!"--flouting, taunting
him who had lost love itself there on the firing line, for a comrade's
sake.

His room was palely luminous with the lustre of the night. On the mantel
squatted a little wizened and gilded god peering and leering at him
through the shadows--Malcourt's parting gift--the ugliest of the
nineteen.

"For," said Malcourt--"there ought to be only eighteen by rights--unless
further complications arise; and this really belongs to you, anyway."

So he left the thing on Hamil's mantel, although the latter had no idea
what Malcourt meant, or why he made the parting offering.

Now he stood there staring at it like a man whose senses waver, and who
fixes some object to steady nerve and brain.

Far in the night the voice of the ocean stirred the silence--the ocean
which had given her to him that day in the golden age of fable when life
and the world were young together, and love wore a laughing mask.

He listened; all the night was sighing with the sigh of the surf; and
the breeze in the trees mourned; and the lustre died out in thickening
darkness as he stood there, listening.

Then all around him through the hushed obscurity a vague murmur grew,
accentless, sad, interminable; and through the monotone of the falling
rain he heard the ocean very far away washing the body of a young world
dead to him for ever.

* * * * *

Crouched low beside her bed, face quivering in her arms, she heard, in
the stillness, the call of the sea--that enchanted sea which had given
him to her that day, when Time and the World were young together in the
blessed age of dreams.

And she heard the far complaint of the surf, breaking unsatis