For an instant she turned and gazed at the sunset, and her eyes took on a strange mystical glow.  A colour came to her face, as though from strong flush of feeling, then she turned to him again, and answered steadily: 

“Yes, he is happy now.”

“How do you know?” the lad asked with awe in his face, for he believed in her utterly.  Then, without waiting for her to answer, he added:  “Is it, you hear him say so, as I hear you singin’ in my sleep sometimes—­singin’, singin’, as you did at Glencader, that first time I ever ’eerd you?  Is it the same as me in my sleep?”

“Yes, it is like that—­just like that,” she answered, taking his hand, and holding it with a motherly tenderness.

“Ain’t you never goin’ to sing again?” he added.

She was silent, looking at him almost abstractedly.

“This war’ll be over pretty soon now,” he continued, “and we’ll all have to go back to work.”

“Isn’t this work?” Al’mah asked with a smile, which had in it something of her old whimsical self.

“It ain’t play, and it ain’t work,” he answered with a sage frown of intellectual effort.”  It’s a cut above ’em both—­that’s my fancy.”

“It would seem like that,” was the response.  “What are you going to do when you get back to England?” she inquired.

“I thought I’d ask you that,” he replied anxiously.  “Couldn’t I be a scene-shifter or somefink at the opery w’ere you sing?”

“I’m going to sing again, am I?” she asked.

“You’d have to be busy,” he protested admiringly.

“Yes, I’ll have to be busy,” she replied, her voice ringing a little, “and we’ll have to find a way of being busy together.”

“His gryce’d like that,” he responded.

She turned her face slowly to the evening sky, where grey clouds became silver and piled up to a summit of light.  She was silent for a long time.

“If work won’t cure, nothing will,” she said in a voice scarce above a whisper.  Her body trembled a little, and her eyes closed, as though to shut out something that pained her sight.

“I wish you’d sing somethin’—­same as you did that night at Glencader, about the green hill far away,” whispered the little trumpeter from the bed.

She looked at him for a moment meditatively, then shook her head, and turned again to the light in the evening sky.

“P’raps she’s makin’ up a new song,” Jigger said to himself.

On a kopje overlooking the place where Ian Stafford had been laid to sleep to the call of the trumpets, two people sat watching the sun go down.  Never in the years that had gone had there been such silence between them as they sat together.  Words had been the clouds in which the lightning of their thoughts had been lost; they had been the disguises in which the truth of things masqueraded.  They had not dared to be silent, lest the truth should stalk naked before them.  Silence would have revealed their unhappiness; they would not have dared to look closely and deeply into each other’s face, lest revelation should force them to say, “It has been a mistake; let us end it.”  So they had talked and talked and acted, and yet had done nothing and been nothing.