“When thou art gone!” she cried.  “When thou art gone with all my mind I’ll hold myself thy bride!  In those strange countries beneath the sun if bitterness comes over thee”—­she put her hand to her heart—­“think of thy fireside here.  Think, ’Even in this wavering life I have an abiding home, a heart that’s true, true, true to me!’ When thou diest—­if thou diest first—­linger for me; where a thousand years are as a day travel not so far that I may not overtake thee.  Mortimer, Mortimer, Mortimer!  I’ll not believe in a God who at the last says not to me, ’That path he took.’  When He says it, listen for my flying feet.  Oh, my dear, listen for my flying feet!”

“Star and rose!” he said.  “If we dream, we dream.  Better so, even though we pass to sleep too deep for dreaming.  For we plan a temple though we build it not....  That falconer’s whistle! is it thy signal?  Then thou must make no tarrying here.  I will put thy cloak about thee.”

He brought from the ruinous steps her watchet mantle, and she let him clasp it about her throat.  In the raised air of that isolate peak where true lovers take farewell there are few words used at the last.  Sighs, kisses, broken utterance,—­“Forever,” ...  “Forever,” ...  “I love thee,” ...  “I love thee”; the eternal “I will come”; the eternal “I will wait”!  Possessors of an instant of time, of an atom of space, they sent their linked hopes, their mailed certainties forth to the unseen, untrenched fields of the future, and held their love coeval with existence.  Then, slowly, she withdrew herself from his clasp, and as slowly moved backward to the broken stair.  He waited by the stone seat, for she must go secretly and in silence, and he might not, as in old times, lead her with stateliness through the ways of Ferne House.  Upon the uppermost step she paused a moment, and he, lifting his eyes, saw above him her mantled figure, her outstretched arms with the lily of her body in between, the gold star swimming above her forehead.  One breathless moment thus, then she turned, and folding her mantle about her, passed from her lover’s sight towards the darkening orchard.

He stayed an hour in the garden, then went back to his great, old, dimly lighted hall.  Here, half the night, chin in one hand, the other hanging below his booted knee, he brooded over the now glowing, now ashen chimney logs; yet Robin-a-dale, who believed in Master Arden, and very mightily in visions as beautiful as that which had been vouchsafed to him going through the orchard that eventide, felt as light a heart as if no shadowy ship awaited in the little port down by the little town, whose people either cursed or looked askance.  Waking in the middle of the night, he thought he saw a knight at prayer—­one of the old stone Templars from Ferne church, where they lay with palm to palm, awaiting with frozen patience the last trumpet-call that ever they should hear.  This knight, however, was kneeling with bowed head and hidden face, a thing against all rule with those other stark and sternly waiting forms.  So Robin, being too drowsy to reason, let the matter alone and went to sleep again.