He went up the stoop and rang the bell.  A servant opened the door, showed him into the dimly lighted parlor, and went up the stairs with his name.  He heard her footsteps, light, hesitant.  She appeared before him, pale and sick and desperate.

“What do you want?” she asked in a tortured voice.

He arose and came close to her.  He spoke authoritatively: 

“Myra, get on your things.  We must take a walk.”

Her shifting eyes glanced up, gave him their full luminous gray and all the trouble of her heart.

“Myra,” his voice deepened, and struck through her, “you must go with me to-night.  It’s our last chance.”

She turned and was gone.  He heard her light footsteps ascending; he waited, wondering, hoping; and then she came down again, showing her head at the door.  She had on the little rounded felt hat, and she carried her muff.

They went out together, saying nothing, stepping near one another under the lamps and over the avenues, and into the Park.  It was a strange, windy night, touched with the first bleakness of winter, tinged with the moaning melancholy of the tossing oak-trees, and with streaks of faint reflected city lights in the far heavens.

It was their last night together.  Both knew it.  There was no help for it.  The great issues of life were sweeping them away into black gulfs of the future, where there might never be meeting again, never hand-touch nor sound of each other’s voice.  And strangely life deepened in their hearts, and they were swept by the mystery of being alive ... alive in the star-streaked darkness of space, alive with so many other brief creatures that brightened for a moment in the gloom and then sank away into the stormy heart of nature.  And Love contended with Death, and the little labors of man helped Death to crush Love; and so that moment of existence, that brief span, became a mere brute struggle, a clash, a fight, a thing sordid and worse than death.

Out of the mystery, each, from some unimaginable distance, had come forth and met here on the earth, met for a wild moment, a moment that gave them lightning-lit glimpses of that mystery, only to part from each other now, each to return into the darkness.

They felt in unison more than they could ever say.  And it was the last night together.

They sat down on a bench, under those mournful boughs, under the lamentations of the oaks.

“Myra,” said Joe.

She murmured, “Yes.”

His voice was charged with some of the strangeness of the night, some significance of the mystery of life and death.

“You read my letter ...”

“Yes.”

“And you understand ... at last?”

“I don’t know ...  I can’t tell.”

He paused; he leaned nearer.

“Why are you going away?”

“I’ve been sick,” she whispered.  “The doctor told me to go.”

“For long?”