It happens occasionally, in moments of all but tolerable pain, that
some small thing, a word, a look, a touch of a hand, lets in such a
gleam of peace that nothing ever extinguishes the light of it: it
burns on for years and years, sometimes clear, sometimes obscured,
but as ineffaceable from life and memory as a star from its place in
the heavens. Such, both then, and through the lonely years to come,
were those five words, "You must trust me. Hilary."

She did; and in the perfection of that trust her own separate
identity, with all its consciousness of pain, seemed annihilated; she
did not think of herself at all, only of him, and with him, and for
him. So, for the time being, she lost all sense of personal
suffering, and their walk that night was as cheerful and happy as if
they were to walk together for weeks and months and years, in
undivided confidence and content, instead of its being the last--the
very last.

Some one has said that all lovers have, soon or late, to learn to be
only friends: happiest and safest are those in whom the friendship is
the foundation--always firm and ready to fall back upon, long after
the fascination of passion dies. It may take a little from the
romance of these two if I own that Robert Lyon talked to Hilary not a
word about love, and a good deal about pure business, telling her all
his affairs and arrangements, and giving her as clear an idea of his
future life as it was possible to do within the limits of one brief
half hour.

Then casting a glance round, and seeing that Ascott was quite out of
ear-shot, he said, with that tender fall of the voice that felt, as