himself and her.

He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers and
looked on her sweet face for the last time. "Good-bye!" he
whispered to that dear sight, "good-bye!"

And then in silence he turned away from her.

She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in
the rhythm of them threw her into a passion of weeping.

He walked away.

He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows
were beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the
hour of his sacrifice should come, but as he walked he lifted up
his eyes and saw the morning, the morning like an angel in golden
armour, marching down the steeps . . . .

It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind
world in the valley, and his love and all, were no more than a pit
of sin.

He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on and
passed through the wall of the circumference and out upon the
rocks, and his eyes were always upon the sunlit ice and snow.

He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over
them to the things beyond he was now to resign for ever!

He thought of that great free world that he was parted from,
the world that was his own, and he had a vision of those further
slopes, distance beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of
multitudinous stirring beauty, a glory by day, a luminous mystery
by night, a place of palaces and fountains and statues and white
houses, lying beautifully in the middle distance. He thought how
for a day or so one might come down through passes drawing ever
nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He thought of the
river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still vaster
world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert places,
the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded, and the big
steamers came splashing by and one had reached the sea--the
limitless sea, with its thousand islands, its thousands of islands,
and its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeyings
round and about that greater world. And there, unpent by
mountains, one saw the sky--the sky, not such a disc as one saw it
here, but an arch of immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which
the circling stars were floating . . . .

His eyes began to scrutinise the great curtain of the
mountains with a keener inquiry.

For example; if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney
there, then one might come out high among those stunte