Out of the dark it had come; into the dark it went.

And no one to care--no one to cry farewell to him across that desolation of emptiness that was death! No one to kneel beside him and pray for light in that awful, all-encompassing dark! Stay! Something had touched him even then.

Or was it but his dying fancy?
Red lips he had kissed and that had kissed him in return, eager arms that had clung and clung, eyes of burning adoration! Did they truly belong all to the past?
Or were they here beside him even now--even now?
Had he wandered backwards perchance into that strange, sweet heaven of love from which he had been so suddenly and terribly cast out?
Ah, how he had loved her! How he had loved her! Very faintly there began to stir within him the old fiery longing that she, and she alone, had ever waked within him.

He would worship her to the last flicker of his dying soul.
But the darkness was spreading, spreading, like a yawning of a great gulf at his feet.

Already he was slipping over the edge.