“Sweetheart,” he cried.  “Sweetheart!  For I will call you sweetheart, though we never meet again.  You are mine, Alice.  We cannot help ourselves.”

The girl stood as in a trance, her eyes caught and held by his face.

“Oh, the misery of things,” she said half-sobbing.  “I have given my soul to another, and I knew it was not mine to give.  Why, oh why, did you not speak to me sooner?  I have been hungering for you and you never came.”

A sense of his folly choked him.

“And I have made you suffer, poor darling!  And the whole world is out of joint for us!”

The hopeless feeling of loss, forgotten for a moment, came back to him.  The girl was gone from him for ever, though a bridge of hearts should always cross the chasm of their severance.

“I am going away,” he said, “to make reparation.  I have my repentance to work out, and it will be bitterer than yours, little woman.  Ours must be an austere love.”

She looked at him till her pale face flushed and a sad exultation woke in her eyes.

“You will never forget?” she asked wistfully, confident of the answer.

“Forget!” he cried.  “It is my only happiness to remember.  I am going away to be knocked about, dear.  Wild, rough work, but with a man’s chances!”

For a moment she let another thought find harbour in her mind.  Was the past irretrievable, the future predetermined?  A woman’s word had an old right to be broken.  If she went to him, would not he welcome her gladly, and the future might yet be a heritage for both?

The thought endured but a moment, for she saw how little simple was the crux of her destiny.  The two of them had been set apart by the fates; each had salvation to work out alone; no facile union would ever join them.  For him there was the shaping of a man’s path; for her the illumination which only sorrows and parting can bring.  And with the thought she thought kindly of the man to whom she had pledged her word.  It was but a little corner of her heart he could ever possess; but doubtless in such matters he was not ambitious.

Lewis walked by her side down the by-path towards Glenavelin.  Tragedy muffled in the garments of convention was there, not the old picturesque Tragic with sword and cloak and steel for the enemy, but the silent Tragic which pulls at the heart-strings.

“The summer is over,” she said.  “It has been a cruel summer, but very bright.”

“Romance with the jarring modern note which haunts us all to-day,” he said.  “This upland country is confused with bustling politics, and pastoral has been worried to death by sickness of heart.  You cannot find the old peaceful life without.”

“And within?” she asked.

“That is for you and me to determine, dear.  God grant it.  I have found my princess, like the man in the fairy-tale, but I may not enter the kingdom.”

“And the poor princess must sit and mope in her high stone tower?  It is a hard world for princesses.”