More than once on that April afternoon, Rupert tried to take Margaret's conversation back to his own deep love for her; but, just as her brother Arthur had found, four months earlier, so he found now, that some dominating force in her personality kept him at bay--mastered him, in spite of himself. It was she who finally gave him a gentle word of dismissal, so gentle, that he could not be hurt, even though the parting from her seemed to him to tear his heart in two. "I may come again?" he said, his speech sounding terse and abrupt, because of his very excess of feeling; and she smiled into his face, a strange smile, which he could not understand. "Yes," she answered; "you may--come again; and, Rupert, forgive me if by being your friend I have only hurt you. I have done nothing for you, excepting give you pain. I think----"--she paused, and her eyes turned to the soft sky behind the delicate April leaves--"I think I have done so little, so terribly little with my life." "But you have _been_ so much," he answered, his hand holding hers closely, in a long warm clasp; "and it is what you are that matters, and that influences your fellow beings--what you are, so much more than what you do. And what you are lives for ever," he added, in a burst of inspiration very rare in the man, who so seldom gave expression to his thoughts. "There is no end to a good influence; it never dies; it could not ever die. What you are has helped everyone who knows--and loves you." "But this is not good-bye," he said a moment later, before he left the room. "You say I may come again; this is only _au revoir_." "_Au revoir_, then," she answered, that inexplicable smile breaking over her face again. "But," she whispered under her breath, as the door closed behind him, "it will be _au revoir_ in a land where there will not be any more heart-breaks or good-byes--the land--that is not--very far off--but--near--so very near." She had known the truth when she told Rupert he might come again, knowing that her days were actually numbered, that the end of which she had told him, was very close at hand. And so it was, that when Rupert Mernside next journeyed down to the lonely house in the valley, where the touch of spring lay on woodland and copse, where primroses lifted starry eyes under the hazels, and wind flowers swung in the April breeze, he came to follow Margaret to the quiet churchyard on the hill-side.