One moment more, she thought.  It was good to see that light upon his face, to fancy how that first word would sound, to feel that the struggle was past and that there was nothing but happiness in the future, full, overflowing, overwhelming, reaching from earth to heaven and through time to eternity.  One moment, only, before she let him wake—­it was such glory to be loved at last!  Still the light was there, still that exquisite smile was on his lips.  And they would be always there now, she thought.

At last she spoke.

“Then love, since you are mine, and I am yours, wake from the dream to life itself—­wake, not knowing that you have slept, knowing only that you love me now and always—­wake, love wake!”

She waved her delicate hand before his eyes and still resting the other upon his shoulder, watched the returning brightness in the dark pupils that had been glazed and fixed a moment before.  And as she looked, her own beauty grew radiant in the splendour of a joy even greater than she had dreamed of.  As it had seemed to him when he had lost himself in her gaze, so now she also fancied that the grim, gray wilderness was full of a soft rosy light.  The place of the dead was become the place of life; the great solitude was peopled as the whole world could never be for her; the crumbling gravestones were turned to polished pillars in the temple of an immortal love, and the ghostly, leafless trees blossomed with the undying flowers of the earthly paradise.

One moment only, and then all was gone.  The change came, sure, swift and cruel.  As she looked, it came, gradual, in that it passed through every degree, but sudden also, as the fall of a fair and mighty building, which being undermined in its foundations passes in one short minute through the change from perfect completeness to hopeless and utter ruin.

All the radiance, all the light, all the glory were gone in an instant.  Her own supremely loving look had not vanished, her lips still parted sweetly, as forming the word that was to answer his, and the calm indifferent face of the waking man was already before her.

“What is it?” he asked, in his kind and passionless voice.  “What were you going to ask me, Unorna?”

It was gone.  The terribly earnest appeal had been in vain.  Not a trace of that short vision of love remained impressed upon his brain.

With a smothered cry of agony Unorna leaned against the great slab of stone behind her and covered her eyes.  The darkness of night descended upon her, and with it the fire of a burning shame.

Then a loud and cruel laugh rang through the chilly air, such a laugh as the devils in hell bestow upon the shame of a proud soul that knows its own infinite bitterness.  Unorna started and uncovered her eyes, her suffering changed in a single instant to ungovernable and destroying anger.  She made a step forwards and then stopped short, breathing hard.  The Wanderer, too, had turned, more quickly than she.  Between two tall gravestones, not a dozen paces away, stood a man with haggard face and eyes on fire, his keen, worn features contorted by a smile in which unspeakable satisfaction struggled for expression with a profound despair.