Good-night,—­farewell!  If henceforth different ways of life we wend, Remember that I sought to walk beside you to the end!

Good-night,—­farewell!  When present things are merged into the past, Remember that I love you and shall love you to the last!

My heart beat with a quick and sudden agony of pain—­was it, could it be true that I was of my own accord going to sever myself from one whom I knew,—­whom I felt—­to be all in all to me?

“Good-night!” said a low voice close to my ear.

I started.  I had lost myself in a wilderness of thought and memory.  Santoris stood beside me.

“Your friends are going,” he said,—­“and I too shall be gone to-morrow!”

A wave of desolation overcame me.

“Ah, no!” I exclaimed—­“Surely you will not go—­”

“I must,” he answered, quietly,—­“Are not you going?  It has been a joy to meet you, if only for a little while—­a pause in the journey,—­an attempt at an understanding!—­though you have decided that we must part again.”

I clasped my hands together in a kind of desperation.

“What can I do?” I murmured—­“If I yielded now to my own impulses—­”

“Ah!  If you did”—­he said, wistfully—­“But you will not; and perhaps, after all, it is better so.  It is no doubt intended that you should be absolutely certain of yourself this time.  And I will not stand in the way.  Good-night,—­and farewell!”

I looked at him with a smile, though the tears were in my eyes.

“I will not say farewell!” I answered.

He raised my hands lightly to his lips.

“That is kind of you!” he said—­“and to-morrow you shall hear from me about Aselzion and the best way for you to see him.  He is spending the summer in Europe, which is fortunate for you, as you will not have to make so far a journey.”

We broke off our conversation here as the others joined us,—­and in a very little while we had left the ‘Dream’ and were returning to our own yacht.  To the last, as the motor launch rushed with us through the water, I kept my eyes fixed on the reposeful figure of Santoris, who with folded arms on the deck rail of his vessel, watched our departure.  Should I never see him again, I wondered?  What was the strange impulse that had more or less moved my spirit to a kind of opposition against his, and made me so determined to seek out for myself the things that he assumed to have mastered?  I could not tell.  I only knew that from the moment he had begun to relate the personal narrative of his own studies and experiences, I had resolved to go through the same training whatever it was, and learn what he had learned, if such a thing were possible.  I did not think I should succeed so well,—­but some new knowledge I felt I should surely gain.  The extraordinary attraction he exercised over me was growing too strong to resist, yet I was determined not to yield to it because I doubted both its cause