In all else, silent as they sat, their communion was perfect.

It was in the mind of each that the women might be arrested on the morrow; in the mind of each that this was their last evening together, the last of few, yet not so few that they did not seem to the man and the girl to bulk large in their lives.

On that hearth they had met, there she had proved to him what she was, there he had spoken, there spent the clouded never-to-be-forgotten days of their troubled courtship.

No wonder that as they sat hand in hand, their hair almost mingling, their eyes on the red glow of the smouldering log, and, not daring to look forward, looked back--no wonder that their love grew to be something other than the common love of man and maid, something higher and more beautiful, touched--as the hills are touched at sunset--by the evening glow of parting and self-sacrifice.
Silent amid the silence of the house; living moments never to be forgotten; welcoming together the twin companions, love and death.
But from the darkest outlook of the mind, as of the eye, morning dispels some shadows; into the most depressing atmosphere daylight brings hope, brings actuality, brings at least the need to be doing.

Claude's heart, as he slipped from his couch on the settle next morning, and admitted the light and turned the log and stirred the embers, was sad and full of foreboding.