Stay!  Something had touched him even then.  Or was it but his dying fancy?  Red lips he had kissed and that had kissed him in return, eager arms that had clung and clung, eyes of burning adoration!  Did they truly belong all to the past?  Or were they here beside him even now—­even now?  Had he wandered backwards perchance into that strange, sweet heaven of love from which he had been so suddenly and terribly cast out?  Ah, how he had loved her!  How he had loved her!  Very faintly there began to stir within him the old fiery longing that she, and she alone, had ever waked within him.  He would worship her to the last flicker of his dying soul.  But the darkness was spreading, spreading, like a yawning of a great gulf at his feet.  Already he was slipping over the edge.  The light was fading out of his sky.

It was the last dim instinct of nature that made him reach out a groping hand, and with lips that would scarcely move to whisper, “Puck!”

He did not expect an answer.  The things of earth were done with.  His life was passing swiftly, swiftly, like the sands running out of a glass.  He had lost her already, and the world had sunk away, away, with all warmth and light and love.

Yet out of the darkness all suddenly there came a voice, eager, passionate, persistent.  “I am here, Billikins!  I am here!  Come back to me, darling!  Come back!”

He started at that voice, started and paused, holding back as it were on the very verge of the precipice.  So she was there indeed!  He could hear her sobbing breath.  There came to him the consciousness of her hands clasping his, and the faintest, vaguest glow went through his ice-cold body.  He tried, piteously weak as he was, to bend his fingers about hers.

And then there came the warmth of her lips upon them, kissing them with a fierce passion of tenderness, drawing them close as if to breathe her own vitality into his failing pulses.

“Open your eyes to me, darling!” she besought him.  “See how I love you!  And see how I want your love!  I can’t do without it, Billikins.  It’s my only safeguard.  What!  He is dead?  I say he is not—­he is not!  Or if he is, he shall rise again.  He shall come back.  See!  He is looking at me!  How dare you say he is dead?”

The wild anguish of her voice reached him, pierced him, rousing him as no other power on earth could have roused him.  Out of that deathly inertia he drew himself, inch by inch, as out of some clinging swamp.  His hand found strength to tighten upon hers.  He opened his eyes, leaden-lidded as they were, and saw her face all white and drawn, gazing into his own with such an agony of love, such a consuming fire of worship, that it seemed as if his whole being were drawn by it, warmed, comforted, revived.

She hung above him, fierce in her devotion, driving back the destroyer by the sheer burning intensity of her love.  “You shan’t die, Billikins!” she told him, passionately.  “You can’t die—­now I am here!”