. and to try . . .
Marise! I will try. I will try with all my might. Can anybody do more
than try with all his might?"

Their gaze into each other's eyes went far beyond the faltering words
they spoke. She asked him in a low voice, "Couldn't you do more for me
than for yourself? One never knows, but . . . what else is love for, but
to give greater strength than we have?"

There was a moment's silence, in which their very spirits met flame-like
in the void, challenging, hoping, fearing. The man's face set. His
burning look of power enveloped her like the reflection of the sun. "I
swear you shall have it!" he said desperately, his voice shaking.

She looked up at him with a passionate gratitude. "I'll never forget
that as long as I live!" she cried out to him.

The tears stood in his eyes as in hers.

For the fraction of an instant, they had felt each other there, as never
before they had felt any other human being: they had both at once caught
a moment of flood-tide, and both together had been carried up side by
side; the long, inevitable isolation of human lives from birth onward
had been broken by the first real contact with another human soul. They
felt the awed impulse to cover their eyes as before too great a glory.

The tide ebbed back, and untroubled they made no effort to stop its
ebbing. They had touched their goal, it was really there. Now they knew
it within their reach. Appeased, assuaged, fatigued, they felt the need
for quiet, they knew the sweetness of sobriety. They even looked away
from each other, aware of their own bodies which for that instant had
been left behind. They entered again into the flesh that clad their
spirits, taking possession of their hands and feet and members, and
taken possession of by them again. The fullness of their momentary
satisfaction had been so complete that they felt no regret, only a
simple, tender pleasure as of being again at home. They smiled happily
at each other and sat silent, hand in hand.

* * * * *

Now they saw the beauty before them, the vast plain, the mountains, the
sea: harmonious, serene, ripe with maturity, evocative of all the
centuries of conscious life which had unrolled themselves there.

"It's too beautiful to be real, isn't it?" murmured the girl, "and now,
the peaceful way I feel this minute, I don't mind it's being so old that
it makes you feel a midge in the sunshine with only an hour or two of
life before y