Victoria could feel through her own body the shudders that
shook the girl's frame. Then Farwell's voice rose again, louder and
louder, like the upward flicker of a dying candle.

'Yes, freedom's my message, the right to live. This world into which we
are evolved by a selfish act of joy, into which we are dragged unwilling
with pain for our usher, it is a world which has no justification save
the freedom to enjoy it as we may. I have lived a stoic, but it is a
hedonist I die. Unshepherded I go into a perhaps. But I regret nothing
. . . all the certainties of the past are not worth the possible of the
future. Behind me others tread the road that leads up the hill.'

He paused for breath. Then again his voice arose as a cry, proclaiming
his creed.

'On the top of the hill. There I see the unknown land, running with milk
and honey. I see a new people; beautiful young, beautiful old. Its
fathers have ground the faces of the helots; they have fought and
lusted, they have suffered contumely and stripes. Now they know the Law,
the Law that all may keep because they are beyond the Law. They do not
desire, for they have, they do not weigh, for they know. They have not
feared, they have dared; they have spared no man, nor themselves. Ah!
now they have opened the Golden Gates. . . .'

The man's voice broke, he coughed, a thin stream of blood trickled from
the side of his mouth. Victoria felt a film come over her eyes. She
leant over him to staunch the flow. They saw one another then. Farwell's
voice went down to a whisper.

'Victoria . . . victorious . . . my love . . . never more. . . .'

She looked into his glazing eyes.

'Beyond . . .' he whispered; then his head fell to one side and his jaw
dropped.

Betty turned away. She was crying. The landlady wiped her hands on her
apron. Victoria hesitatingly took hold of Farwell's wrist. He was dead.
She looked at him stupidly for a moment, then drew her cloak round her
shivering shoulders. The landlady too was crying now.

'Oh, mum, sich a nice genelman,' she moaned. 'But 'e did go on so!'

Victoria smiled pitifully. What an epitaph for a sunset! She drove away
with Betty and, as the horse trotted through the deserted streets,
hugged the girl in her arms. Betty was shuddering violently, and nestled
close up to her. They did not speak. Everything seemed to have become
loose in Victoria's mind and to be floating on a black sea. The pillar
of her individualism was down. Her code