Stocks, who had made a great pet of Peter’s pretty sweetheart, blubbered when he learned the truth, and the younger Checkleigh, who delighted to sketch her, left off because his hand shook so, and he couldn’t see clearly.  The Spanish student in the velvet coat, who could sing lustily to a guitar, came and sang for her, not the ribald songs the Quartier heard from him, but the beautiful and soft love songs he had heard as a child in Andalusia—­how love is an immortal rose one carries through the gates of the grave into the gates of paradise.  And the Quartier, which knows so much sorrow as well as so much joy, came with its gayest gossip to make her smile.  Peter himself lived in a sort of tormented daze.—­It was Denise, his little Denise, who was going!

Denise herself was the calmest and cheerfulest of them all.  Her high destiny had been to love Peter Champneys, and she had fulfilled it.  The good, the kind God had given her that which in her estimation outweighed everything else.  She had lived, she had loved.  Now she could go, and go content.

“It is better so,” she told him, with that piercing good sense of the French which is like a spiritual insight.  “Very dear one, suppose I had been called upon to let thee go:  how could I have endured that?” And she added, pressing his fingers, “Do not grieve, my adored Pierre.  Observe that I am but a poor little one to whom in thy goodness of heart thou hast been kind:  but thou art all my life—­all of me, Pierre.”

He put his head against her side, and she stroked it, whispering,

“I had but a little while to stay, beloved.  Because of thee, that stay has been happy—­oh, very, very happy!”

“You have given me all I ever had of youth and love,” said Peter.

“Ah, but I am glad!” she said naively.  “Because of that, I think you must remember!” She looked at him with her blue eyes suddenly full of tears.  “It is only when I think you may forget that I am afraid, it is then as if the dark pressed upon me,” she said in a whisper sharp with pain.  “I lie still and dream how great you will become, how much beloved—­for who could fail to love you, Pierre?  And I am glad.  It rests my heart, which is all yours.  But when I begin to remember how I have been but a little, little part of your life, who have been all of mine, when I think you may forget, then I am afraid, I am afraid!” And she looked at him like a frightened child who is being left alone to go to sleep in the dark.

Peter picked her up, wrapped in the bedquilt, and held her in his arms.  She was very light.  It was as if he held a little ghost.  She shook her bright hair over his shoulders and breast, and he hid his quivering face in it, as in a veil.  Presently, in a soft voice: 

“Godfather!”

“Yes, my little sweetheart.”

“Very dear and precious godfather,—­a long, long time from now, when She comes, She whom you will love as I love you, tell her about me.”