“My dear love, it is not possible,” he said.  “Flower of women! didst dream that I would leave thee here blasted by my name, or that I would carry thee where I must go?  Star of my earth, to-day we say a clean farewell!”

“Then God be with thee,” she said, brokenly.

“And with thee!” he answered.  Hand in hand they moved to the broken wall, and leaning upon it, looked out to that far line of sea.  Her under-sleeve of silver gauze fell away from her arm.

“How white is thy arm!” he breathed.  “How branched with tender blue!”

“Wilt kiss it?” she answered, “so I shall grow to love myself.”

“Thou art the fairest thing the sun shines on,” he said.  “Thy lips are like flowers I have never seen in the West.”

“Gather the flowers,” she said, and raised her face to his.  “The garden is kept for thee.”

The sun began to decline, the earth to darken, swallows circled past.  “It grows late,” she said, “late, late!  When goest thou?”

“Within the week.”

“By then her Grace will have whirled me leagues away....  I would I were a queen.  If thou goest to death—­oh God! we’ll not speak of that!—­Give me that chain of thine.”

He unclasped it, laid it in her hands.  Raising her arms, she drew it over her neck.

“Seest thou thy prisoner?” she asked.  “Forever thy prisoner!” From its fellow of watchet blue she detached her floating silver sleeve.  “It is my favor,” she whispered.  “Wear it when thou wilt.”

He folded the gauze and thrust it within his doublet.  “When I may, my lady,” he said, with his eyes upon the sunset that held the colors of the dawning.  “When I may.”

A sickle moon swung in the gold harvest-fields of the west, then a great star came out to watch that reaping.  The thrush was silent now, but from a covert rushed suddenly the full tide of a nightingale’s song.  With a cry the maid of honor put hands to her ears.  “Ay me, my heart it will break!  Tell me that thou goest but to come again!”

He took her hands, pressing them to his heart, to his lips.  “No, no, my dearest dear, since God no longer worketh miracles!  I go more surely than ever went John Oxenham; I would not have thee cheat thyself, spend thy days in watching, listening.  I kiss thee a lifetime good-by....  Oh child, seest thou how broken I am?  I that myself loosed all the winds—­I that kneel, a penitent, before the just and the unjust, before my lover and my foe!  But when all’s said, all’s done, all’s quiet:—­the arrow sped, the stone fallen, the curfew rung, the dust returned to dust! then shall stand my soul....  A ruined man, a man in just disgrace, who hath played the coward, who hath sinned against thee and against others, that am I—­yet our souls endure, and thou art my mate; queenly as thou standest here, thou art my mate!  I love thee, and in life, in death, I claim thee still:  Forget me not when I am gone!”