“Oh, Sylvia!” and he added:  “The life is not yet saved!”

“Perhaps I am given to the summer,” she answered, and then, with a whimsical change of humor, she laughed tenderly.  “Oh, but I wish I wasn’t.  You will write?  Letters will come from you.”

“As often as possible, my dear.  But they won’t come often.”

“Let them be long, then,” she whispered, “very long,” and she leaned her head against his shoulder.

“Lie close, my dear,” said he.  “Lie close!”

For a while longer they talked in low voices to one another, the words which lovers know and keep fragrant in their memories.  The night, warm and clear, drew on toward morning, and the passage of the hours was unremarked.  For both of them there was a glory upon the moonlit land and sea which made of it a new world.  And into this new world both walked for the first time—­walked in their youth and hand in hand.  Each for the first time knew the double pride of loving and being loved.  In spite of their troubles they were not to be pitied, and they knew it.  The gray morning light flooded the sky and turned the moon into a pale white disk.

“Lie close, my dear,” said he.  “It is not time.”

In the trees in the garden below the blackbirds began to bustle amongst the leaves, and all at once their clear, sweet music thrilled upward to the lovers in the hollow of the down.

“Lie close, my dear,” he repeated.

They watched the sun leap into the heavens and flash down the Channel in golden light.

“The night has gone,” said Chayne.

“Nothing can take it from us while we live,” answered Sylvia, very softly.  She raised herself from her couch of leaves.

Then from one of the cottages in the tiny village a blue coil of smoke rose into the air.

“It is time,” said Chayne, and they rose and hand in hand walked down the slope of the hill to the house.  Sylvia unlatched the door noiselessly and went in.  Chayne stepped in after her; and in the silent hall they took farewell of one another.

“Good-by, my dear,” she whispered, with the tears in her eyes and in her voice, and she clung to him a little and so let him go.  She held the door ajar until the sound of his footsteps had died away—­and after that.  For she fancied that she heard them still, since, she so deeply wished to hear them.  Then with a breaking heart she went up the stairs to her room.

CHAPTER XXI

CHAYNE COMES TO CONCLUSIONS

“Six weeks ago I said good-by to the French Commission on the borders of a great lake in Africa.  A month ago I was still walking to the rail head through the tangle of a forest’s undergrowth,” said Chayne, and he looked about the little restaurant in King Street, St. James’, as though to make sure that the words he spoke were true.  The bright lights, the red benches against the walls, the women in their delicate gowns of lace, and the jingle of harness in the streets without, made their appeal to one who for the best part of a year had lived within the dark walls of a forest.  June had come round again, and Sylvia sat at his side.