I caught at her hand in the dark.

"The words are all wrong," I said. "It is because we have no words to
describe that. But have I made you feel it at all? Oh! Mrs. MacNairn,
have I been able to make you know that it was not a dream?"

She lifted my hand and pressed it passionately against her cheek, and
her cheek, too, was wet--wet.

"No, it was not a dream," she said. "You came back. Thank God you came
back, just to tell us that those who do not come back stand awakened in
that ecstasy--in that ecstasy. And The Fear is nothing. It is only
The Dream. The awakening is out on the hillside, out on the hillside!
Listen!" She started as she said it. "Listen! The nightingale is
beginning again."

He sent forth in the dark a fountain--a rising, aspiring fountain--of
golden notes which seemed to reach heaven itself. The night was made
radiant by them. He flung them upward like a shower of stars into
the sky. We sat and listened, almost holding our breath. Oh! the
nightingale! the nightingale!

"He knows," Hector MacNairn's low voice said, "that it was not a dream."

When there was silence again I heard him leave his chair very quietly.

"Good night! good night!" he said, and went away. I felt somehow that
he had left us together for a purpose, but, oh, I did not even remotely
dream what the purpose was! But soon she told me, almost in a whisper.