“No, not for ever—­only till to-morrow,” he answered.

“To-morrow! to-morrow!” she replied.  “There will be no to-morrow.”

“Yes, yes:  in a very few hours we shall have come to that blessed day,” he said cheerfully.  “Kiss me, darling, that I may carry away your sweetest memory till I see you again.  You will kiss me, Leam, of your own free will to-night, will you not?” He said this a little tremulously, his arms round her.

“Yes,” she answered, “I will kiss you to-night.”

She turned her face to him and put her hands round his neck frankly:  then with an uncontrollable impulse she flung herself against his breast and, clasping her arms tight, bent his head down to her level and kissed him on the forehead with the passionate sorrow, the reluctant despair of an eternal farewell.  It was something that irresistibly suggested death.

Edgar was distressed at her manner, distressed to have to leave her; but he must.  Life is made up of petty duties, paltry obligations.  Great events come but rarely and are seldom uninterrupted.  A shower of rain and the dinner-hour are parts of the mosaic and help in the catastrophe which looks as if it had been the offspring of the moment.  And just now the supreme exigencies to be attended to were the dinner-hour at the Hill and the rain that was beginning to fall.

Saddened, surprised, yet gratified too by her emotion, Edgar answered it in his own way.  He kissed her again and again, smoothed her hair, passed his hand over her soft fresh cheeks, held her to him tightly clasped; and Leam did not refuse his caresses.  She seemed to have suddenly abandoned all the characteristics of her former self:  the mask had fallen finally, and her soul, released from its long imprisonment, was receiving its gift, not of tongues, but of fire—­not of healing, but of suffering.

“My darling,” he half whispered, “I shall see you to-morrow.  Come, do not be so cast down:  it is not reasonable, my heart.  And tears in those sweet eyes?  My Leam, dry them:  they are too beautiful for tears.  Look up, my darling.  Give me one happy little smile, and remember to-morrow and for all our lives after.”

But Learn could not smile.  Her face was set to its old mask of tragedy and sorrow.  Something, she knew not what, had passed out of her life, and something had come into it—­something that Edgar for the moment could neither restore nor yet banish.  He pressed her to him for the last time, kissed her passive face again and again, caught the scent of the lemon-plant in her hair where he had placed it, and left her.  As he passed through the gate the storm burst in all its fury, and Leam went up into her own room in a voiceless, tearless grief that made the whole earth a desert and all life desolation.