life, in death, I
claim thee still: Forget me not when I am gone!"

"When thou art gone!" she cried. "When thou art gone with all my mind
I'll hold myself thy bride! In those strange countries beneath the sun
if bitterness comes over thee"--she put her hand to her heart--"think of
thy fireside here. Think, 'Even in this wavering life I have an abiding
home, a heart that's true, true, true to me!' When thou diest--if thou
diest first--linger for me; where a thousand years are as a day travel
not so far that I may not overtake thee. Mortimer, Mortimer, Mortimer!
I'll not believe in a God who at the last says not to me, 'That path he
took.' When He says it, listen for my flying feet. Oh, my dear, listen
for my flying feet!"

"Star and rose!" he said. "If we dream, we dream. Better so, even though
we pass to sleep too deep for dreaming. For we plan a temple though we
build it not.... That falconer's whistle! is it thy signal? Then thou
must make no tarrying here. I will put thy cloak about thee."

He brought from the ruinous steps her watchet mantle, and she let him
clasp it about her throat. In the raised air of that isolate peak where
true lovers take farewell there are few words used at the last. Sighs,
kisses, broken utterance,--"Forever," ... "Forever," ... "I love
thee," ... "I love thee"; the eternal "I will come"; the eternal "I will
wait"! Possessors of an instant of time, of an atom of space, they sent
their linked hopes, their mailed certainties forth to the unseen,
untrenched fields of the future, and held their love coeval with
existence. Then, slowly, she withdrew herself from his clasp, and as
slowly moved backward to the broken stair. He waited by the stone seat,
for she must go secretly and in silence, and he might not, as in old
times, lead her with stateliness through the ways of Ferne House. Upon
the uppermost step she paused a moment, and he, lifting his eyes, saw
above him her mantled figure, her outstretched arms with the lily of
her body in between, the gold star swimming above her forehead. One
breathless moment thus, then she turned, and folding her mantle about
her, passed from her lover's sight towards the darkening orchard.

He stayed an hour in the garden, then went back to his great, old,
dimly lighted hall. Here, half the night, chin in one hand, the other
hanging below his booted knee, he brooded over the now glowing, now
ashen chimney logs; yet Robin-a-dale, who believed in Master Arden,