the
disfigured cheek turned from him.

He would have replied, but she made a sign to him to eat, and, seating
herself on a stool in the corner with her plate on her lap, she set him
an example. Apart from her weary attitude, and the droop of her head, he
might have deemed the scene in which they had taken part a figment of
his brain. But round them was the gloom of the closed room!

"You did not see me?" he repeated presently.

She stood up. "I would I had never seen you!" she cried; and her
anguished tone bore witness to the truth of her words. "It is the worst,
it is the bitterest thing of all! of all!" she repeated. The settle was
between them, and she rested her hands on the back of it. He stooped,
and, in the darkness, covered them with kisses, while his breast heaved
with the swell of the storm which her entrance had cut short. "For all
but that I was prepared," she continued; "I was ready. I have seen for
weeks the hopelessness of it, the certain end, the fate before us. I
have counted the cost, and I have learned to look beyond for--for all we
desire. It is a sharp passage, and peace. But you"--her voice rested on
the same tragic note of monotony--"are outside the sum, and spoil all. A
little suffering will kill my mother, a little, a very little fear. I
doubt if she will live to be taken hence. And I--I can suffer. I have
known all, I have foreseen all--long! I have learned to think of it, and
I can learn by God's help to bear it! And in a little while, a very
little while, it will be over, and I shall be at rest. But you--you, my
love----"

Her voice broke, her head sunk forward. His lips met hers in a first
kiss; a kiss, salted by the tears that ran unchecked down his face. For
a long minute there was silence in the room, a silence broken only by
the low, inarticulate murmur of his love--love whispered brokenly on her
tear-wet lips, on her cold, closed eyelids. She made no attempt to
withdraw her face, and presently the murmur grew to words of defiance,
of love that mocked at peril, mocked at shame, mocked at death, having
assurance of its own, having assurance of her.

They fell on her ears as warm thaw-rain on frozen sward; and slowly into
the pallor of her face, the whiteness of her closed eyelids, crept a
tender blush. Strange that for a few brief moments they were happy;
strange, proof marvellous of the dominance of the inner life over the
outer, of love over death.

"My love, my love!"

"Again