ew that the end was not far away. The wolves were gone at last, and
my fire was dying down. He needed my touch upon his breast no longer,
and I went to the stream and bathed my hands and forehead, and then
threw myself face downward upon the bank. In a little while the desolate
murmur of the water became intolerable, and I rose and went back to the
fire, and to the man whom, as God lives, I loved as a brother.

He was conscious. Pale and cold and nigh gone as he was, there came a
light to his eyes and a smile to his lips when I knelt beside him. "You
did not go?" he breathed.

"No," I answered, "I did not go."

For a few minutes he lay with closed eyes; when he again opened them
upon my face, there were in their depths a question and an appeal. I
bent over him, and asked him what he would have.

"You know," he whispered. "If you can... I would not go without it."

"Is it that?" I asked. "I forgave you long ago."

"I meant to kill you. I was mad because you struck me before the lady,
and because I had betrayed my trust. An you had not caught my hand,
I should be your murderer." He spoke with long intervals between the
words, and the death dew was on his forehead.

"Remember it not, Diccon," I entreated. "I too was to blame. And I see
not that night for other nights,--for other nights and days, Diccon."

He smiled, but there was still in his face a shadowy eagerness. "You
said you would never strike me again," he went on, "and that I was man
of yours no more forever--and you gave me my freedom in the paper which
I tore." He spoke in gasps, with his eyes upon mine. "I'll be gone in
a few minutes now. If I might go as your man still, and could tell the
Lord Jesus Christ that my master on earth forgave, and took back, it
would be a hand in the dark. I have spent my life in gathering darkness
for myself at the last."

I bent lower over him, and took his hand in mine. "Diccon, my man," I
said.

A brightness came into his face, and he faintly pressed my hand. I
slipped my arm beneath him and raised him a little higher to meet his
death. He was smiling now, and his mind was not quite clear. "Do you
mind, sir," he asked, "how green and strong and sweet smelled the pines
that May day, when we found Virginia, so many years ago?"

"Ay, Diccon," I answered. "Before we saw the land, the fragrance told us
we were near it."

"I smell it now," he went on, "and the bloom of the grape, and the
May-time flowers. And can you no