There is a long silence, and the shadow-leaves dance, and the bees whirl buzzing past, and the strong young life of midsummer mocks dissolution in a subtle, arrogant way. "One good clean year, one clean year, one year's home for a finish! Just as I learnt to know what it meant, to leave it all! It's hard to look on a day like this [sob], and know that to-morrow I rot. A long life as lives go, and nothing to show for it! Well, I always wanted to die in the sunshine, with the birds singing, and, since I knew you, with you near me,--oh, my dear, my poor, dear little one!" He reels, and she clutches him; but he steadies himself by a supreme effort, and says through his ground teeth: "Now I am going to say good-by to the world, and, by God! I'll say it standing. I have had good days in it,--wild, glad days, drunk with the lust of love and wine; but I never saw good or beauty in it till you showed me how. Oh, oh, oh! Let no man write my epitaph!" He stands leaning on her shoulders, looking sea-ward, drinking his fill of sun and sea,--sea that was a rapture to him, that he loved as the greatest and strongest and cruelest thing he knew; the only thing that responded to the wild moods in his soul, and struck a rushing strain of song in his stormy heart that made him rejoice with a fierce delight. The tears fall and splash on her hands, and then she helps him to lie down; and she feels his feet, and they bring hot bottles, for they are getting cold, and he lies with his eyes closed. The village doctor comes and goes; but nothing can be done, the sands are running out fast. "If the Lord be merciful [the sermon is working in him] He will take him before morning, otherwise he will suffer much," he whispers to her. She does not answer, only kneels silently at his side, and he holds her hand. There is a strange smell that has a chill uncleanness in its breath about them.