“You love me?” he asked softly.

“More than anything else in the world,” she whispered.

“Kiss me, Mary Josephine.”

Her lips pressed to his.

He released her from his arms, slowly, lingeringly.

After that she stood in the lighted doorway, watching him, until he disappeared in the gloom of the slope.  She called good-by, and he answered her.  The door closed.

And he went down into the valley, a hand of foreboding gripping at his heart.

XX

With a face out of which all color had fled, and eyes filled with the ghosts of a new horror, Miriam Kirkstone stood before Keith in the big room in the house on the hill.

“He was here—­ten minutes,” she said, and her voice was as if she was forcing it out of a part of her that was dead and cold.  It was lifeless, emotionless, a living voice and yet strange with the chill of death.  “In those ten minutes he told me—­that!  If you fail—­”

It was her throat that held him, fascinated him.  White, slim, beautiful—­her heart seemed pulsing there.  And he could see that heart choke back the words she was about to speak.

“If I fail—­” he repeated the words slowly after her, watching that white, beating throat.

“There is only the one thing left for me to do.  You—­you—­understand?”

“Yes, I understand.  Therefore I shall not fail.”

He backed away from her toward the door, and still he could not take his eyes from the white throat with its beating heart.  “I shall not fail,” he repeated.  “And when the telephone rings, you will be here—­to answer?”

“Yes, here,” she replied huskily.

He went out.  Under his feet the gravelly path ran through a flood of moonlight.  Over him the sky was agleam with stars.  It was a white night, one of those wonderful gold-white nights in the land of the Saskatchewan.  Under that sky the world was alive.  The little city lay in a golden glimmer of lights.  Out of it rose a murmur, a rippling stream of sound, the voice of its life, softened by the little valley between.  Into it Keith descended.  He passed men and women, laughing, talking, gay.  He heard music.  The main street was a moving throng.  On a corner the Salvation Army, a young woman, a young man, a crippled boy, two young girls, and an old man, were singing “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”  Opposite the Board of Trade building on the edge of the river a street medicine-fakir had drawn a crowd to his wagon.  To the beat of the Salvation Army’s tambourine rose the thrum of a made-up negro’s banjo.

Through these things Keith passed, his eyes open, his ears listening, but he passed swiftly.  What he saw and what he heard pressed upon him with the chilling thrill of that last swan-song, the swan-song of Ecla, of Kobat, of Ty, who had heard their doom chanted from the mountain-tops.  It was the city rising up about his cars in rejoicing and triumph.  And it put in his heart a cold, impassive anger.  He sensed an impending doom, and yet he was not afraid.  He was no longer chained by dreams, no more restrained by self.  Before his eyes, beating, beating, beating, he saw that tremulous heart in Miriam Kirkstone’s soft, white throat.