He watched her as she went through the doorway, holding the dog in her arms and turning back to smile at him over her shoulder--anon he listened to her footfall ascending the stairway to her own room--then, to her gentle movements to and fro above his bed--till presently all was silent.

Silence--except for the measured plash of the sea, which he heard distinctly echoing up through the coombe from the shore.

A great loneliness environed him--touched by a great awe.

He felt himself to be a solitary soul in the midst of some vast desert, yet not without the consciousness that a mystic joy, an undreamed-of glory, was drawing near that should make that desert "blossom like the rose." He moved slowly and feebly to the window--against one-half of the latticed pane leaned a bunch of white roses, shining with a soft pearl hue in the light of a lovely moon.
"It is a beautiful world!" he said, half aloud--"No one in his right mind could leave it without some regret!" Then an inward voice seemed to whisper to him-- "You knew nothing of this world you call so beautiful before you entered it; may there not be another world still more beautiful of which you equally know nothing, but of which you are about to make an experience, all life being a process of continuous higher progress ?" And this idea now not only seemed to him possible but almost a certainty.

For as our last Laureate expresses it:-- "Whatever crazy sorrow saith, No life that breathes with human breath Has ever truly longed for death.
'Tis life whereof our nerves are scant, Oh life, not death, for which we pant-- More life, and fuller, that I want!" His brain was so active and his memory so clear that he was somewhat surprised to feel his body so feeble and aching, when at last he undressed, and lay down to sleep.