t. And he should never see her face again! And one was of the night
he spent in his room alone at Dunstan's Wolde--the night when he had
torn the laces from his throat that he might breathe, and had known
himself a frenzied man--while her happy bridegroom to be had slept and
dreamed of her.

From such dreams he would waken with an unreasoning terror--a
nightmare in itself--a sense that even now, even when both were free
and he had seen that in her eyes his soul sought for and cried out
to--even now some Fate might come between and tear them apart, that
their hearts should never beat against each other--never! And, in
truth, cold sweat would break forth on his body and he would spring
from his bed and pace to and fro, lighting the tapers that he might
drive the darkness from him.

"Naught shall come between!" he would cry. "Naught under God's
Heaven--naught on Gods' earth! No man, nor fate, nor devil!"

For he had borne his burden too long, and even for his strength and
endurance its heaviness had been too great.

In these weeks of solitude at Camylott he thought much of him who had
passed from earth, of the years they had been friends, of the days they
had ridden through the green lanes together or walked in the Long
Gallery, he himself but a child, the other his mature and affectionate
companion. He had loved and been beloved, and now he was gone, leaving
behind him no memory which was not tender and full of affectionate
reverence.

"Never," was Osmonde's thought, "in all the years we knew each other
did I hear him utter a thought which was ungenerous or unjust. You, my
lord," he found himself saying aloud one day, "have sure left earth's
regrets behind and see with clearer eyes than ours. A man--loving as
you yourself loved, yearning as you yourself yearned--you will but pity
with a tender soul."

And he could but remember his last interview with Mistress Anne on his
bidding farewell to Dunstan's Wolde after the funeral obsequies.

"'Tis a farewell I bid the place," he had said, "though I may see it
again. I came here as a boy, and in the first years of my young
manhood, and he was always here to bid me welcome. One of my earliest
memories"--they stood in the large saloon together, and he raised his
eyes to a picture near them--"one of my first recollections here is of
this young face with its blushing cheeks, and of my lord's sorrowful
tenderness as he told me that she had died and that his little
son--who,