sion, took
possession of her.

Then out of her misery she cried still again, passionately,
persistently, as she clutched and clung to him, her mate for whom and
with him she was once destined to be a wanderer over the face of the
earth:

"There must be a God! I tell you, there _must_ be a God. He has let
us escape!"

The man looked at her, questioningly.

"Don't you understand? This is the last?"

"The last?"

"Yes--yes, the last! You said it would be never again, if once you
escaped from this!"

He had forgotten. But the woman at his side, holding him up, had
remembered.

"Come!" she said. And they went on again.

CHAPTER XXX

ONE YEAR LATER--AN EPILOGUE

Frances waited for her husband, walking slowly up and down under the row
of pallid city maples. She preferred the open light of the Square to the
gloom of the street that cut like a canyon between the towering
office-buildings on either side of it. There was a touch of autumn in
the air, and a black frost of the night before had left the sidewalks
carpeted with the mottled roans and yellows and russets of the fallen
leaves.

Summer was over and gone. And all life, in some way, seemed to have aged
with the ageing of the year. There was something mournful, to the ears
of the waiting woman, in the very rustle of the dry leaves under her
feet, as she paced the Square. The sight of the half-stripped
tree-branches, here and there, depressed her idle mind with the thought
of skeletons. The smell of the dying leaves made her heart heavy. They
seemed to be whispering of Death, crying out to her at the mutability of
all things that lived and breathed. And she had so wanted always to live
and exult in living; she had so trembled at the thought of these creeping
changes and the insidious passing away of youth and all it meant to her!
"I hate autumn, most awfully," she had confessed to her husband that
morning, dolefully.

She went on, passing from under the shadow of the trees, grateful for the
reassuring thin sunshine of the late afternoon, that touched the roofs
and the tree-tops with gilt, and bathed the more towering
office-buildings in a brazen glory of light, and left the street-dust
swimming in a vapor of pale gold. The city noises seemed muffled and
quiescent. A sense of fulfillment, of pensive maturity, of tranquillity
after tumult, lay over even the urban world before her. She scarcely
knew why or how it was, but it left her me