Trembling, she raised herself at last and spoke his name.  “Guy, is that you?  Dear Guy, speak to me!”

She saw an answering tremor pass through the kneeling figure, but the face remained hidden.  The moonlight lay upon the dark head, and she thought she saw streaks of white upon it.  It was Guy in the flesh then.  It could be none other.  A yearning tenderness thrilled through her.  He had come back—­in spite of all his sinning he had come back.  And again through the years there came to her the picture of the boy she had known and loved—­ah, how dearly! in the days of his innocence.  It was so vivid that for the moment it swept all else aside.  Oh, if he would but move and show her once more the sparkling eager face of his youth!  She longed with a passionate intensity for one glimpse, however fleeting, of that which once had filled her heart with rapture.  And in her longing she herself was swept back for a few blind seconds into the happy realms of girlhood.  She forgot all the bitterness and the sorrow of this land of strangers.  She Stretched out her arms to the golden-winged Romance that had taught her the ecstasy of first love.

“Oh, Guy—­my own Guy—­come to me!” she said.

It moved then, moved suddenly, even convulsively, as a wounded man might move.  He lifted his head, and looked at her.

Her dream passed like the rending of a veil.  His eyes pierced her, but she had to meet them, lacking power to do otherwise.

So for a space they looked at one another in the moonlight, saying no word, scarcely so much as breathing.

Then, at last he got to his feet with the heavy movements of a tired man, stood a while longer looking down at her, finally turned in utter silence and left her.

When Sylvia slept, many hours later, there came again to her for the third and last time the awful dream of two horsemen who galloped towards each other upon the same rocky path.  She saw again the shock of collision and the awful hurtling fall.  She went again down into the stony valley and searched for the man who she knew was dead.  She found him in a deep place that no other living being had ever entered.  He lay with his face upturned to the moonlight, and his eyes wide and glassy gazing upwards.  She drew near, and stooped to close those eyes; but she could not.  For they gazed straight into her own.  They pierced her soul with the mute reproach of a silence that could never be broken again.

She turned and went away through a devastating loneliness.  She knew now which of the two had galloped free and which had fallen, and she went as one without hope or comfort, wandering through the waste places of the earth.

Late in the morning she awoke and looked out upon a world of dreadful sunshine,—­a parched and barren world that panted in vain for the healing of rain.

“It is a land of blasted hopes,” she told herself drearily.  “Everything in it is doomed.”