“Singular, indeed!” replied Muriel, in a low voice, “and how singularly and sadly it ends!” “Not so,” he replied with sweet gravity. “Let it end in our good night, which is always happy with affection and peace. We will dismiss this scene, Muriel. To-morrow we can think more clearly, and we will know its meaning. Meanwhile, good night.” She rose from her seat, and they came toward each other with outstretched hands. It was strange, but for the first time in all their long acquaintance, their hands passed each other, his arms encircled her, and hers rested on his, with her hands upon his shoulders. A trance seemed to glide upon them. The lighted room was very still; the sad wind sighed in the hush around the dwelling; and gazing into each other’s faces, with a vague thrill remotely stirring in the peace of their spirits, they stood motionless, as in a dream. Thus for a little while, which seemed long, lasted their communion. Earthly cares and hopes forgotten, earthly strifes removed and dim, and the sorrow of their hopeless love so chastened and sanctified in the nobleness of mutual sacrifice that it knew no touch of pain. A long, mysterious sigh of the night-wind breathed around the dwelling, and stole into the peace of their minds. Harrington smiled, and his heart rose in benediction as he silently laid his hands upon the fair and sacred head of his beloved. “The night deepens on, Muriel, and we must part,” he gently murmured. “Yes, we must part,” she answered, in a low tone, “and our parting to-night seems like a type of the greater parting.” “To me the same,” he murmured, in a rapt voice. “Never before has it seemed so like parting forever. I might feel thus when passing through the dusks of death, with the dream of all earth’s sweet and vanished hours fading in visions of the life to come.” There was a long pause, in which the cadence of his words seemed to linger like the ghost of music on the air. “But we shall meet there,” she said. “We who have passed so many holy and poetic hours here—we shall meet there. The earthly ‘good-night’ is but the prelude to ‘good-morning.’ So shall the last farewell of earth prelude the heavenly greeting.” “Yes, we shall meet there,” he murmured. “Have we not met there already—friends, true and loving, dwellers in Heaven’s happy star! Who shall gainsay the alchemist who wrote that ‘Heaven hath in it this scene of earth.’ The true life is there, and our existence here is but a fleeting hour of absence from our heavenly home. Yes, we shall meet there, reclothed with the divine memory, and keeping the memory of all we wrought and were on earth, that earth might fulfill the large purposes of God—meet there, old friends, true and loving, changed, and yet the same.”