"Thus do I give you each to each," said he. "Thus do I make you one!" Stern drew Beatrice into his arms. Blind though the old man was, he sensed the act, and smiled. A great and holy peace had shrouded him. "Only that I may feel the sun upon my face!" breathed he. All at once a thinning cloud-haze let the light glow through. Beatrice looked at Stern. He shook his head. "Not yet," he answered. Swiftly uprose the sun. The morning wind dispelled the shrouding vapors. "Oh, what is this warmth?" exclaimed the patriarch, trembling violently. "What is this warmth, this glow upon my face? This life, this--" Out toward the east he stretched both hands. Instinctively the priestlike worship of the sun, old when the world was still in infancy, surged back to him again after the long, lost centuries of darkness and oblivion. "The sun! _The sun!_" he cried, his voice triumphant as a trumpet-call. Tears coursed from his blind eyes; but on his lips a smile of joy unutterable was set. "The sun! _At last! The_--" Stern caught his feeble body as he fell. Down on the sands they laid him. To the stilled heart Stern laid his ear. Tears were in his eyes, too, and in the girl's, as Stern shook his head, silently. Up over the time-worn, the venerable, the kindly face they drew the mantle, but not before each had reverently kissed the wrinkled forehead. "Better thus," whispered the engineer. "Far better, every way. He had his wish; he felt the sunshine on his face; his outgoing spirit must be mingled with that worshipped light and air and sky--with dawn--with springtime--" "With life itself!" said Beatrice. And through her tears she smiled, while higher rose the warm, life-giving sun of spring. BOOK III THE AFTERGLOW CHAPTER I DEATH, LIFE, AND LOVE Life! Life again, and light, the sun and the fresh winds of heaven, the perfect azure of a June sky, the perfume of the passionate red blooms along the lips of the chasm, the full-throated song of hidden birds within the wood to eastward--life, beauty, love--such, the sunrise hour when Allan and the girl once more stood side by side in the outer world, delivered from the perils of the black Abyss. Hardly more real than a disordered nightmare now, the terrible fall into those depths, the captivity among the white barbarians, the battles and the ghastly scenes of war, the labors, the perilous escape. All seemed to fall and fade away from these two lovers, all save their joy in life and in each other, their longing for the inevitable greater passion, pain and joy, their clear-eyed outlook into the vast and limitless possibilities of the future, their future and the world's. And as they stood there, hand in hand beside the body of the fallen patriarch--he whose soul had passed in peace, even at the moment of his life's fulfilment, his knowledge of the sun--awe overcame them both. With a new tenderness, mingled with reverent adoration, Stern drew the girl once more to him.