A vast blaze of light thrust the reeling hills out into blackness, and they saw a mass of the enemy pallid and paralysed in the ghastly glare. Then Ruby shrieked, for a monstrous flame-demon swung a scythe through a huge circle of the night, and the men who had been standing huddled before him stood no more. The rest of the attacking horde turned to save themselves while they could. Then, with a hiss and a roar that seemed to blast the forests, fire sprang from every hillside and streamed over the flying forces. The sky became full of burning villages, and the ears were stifled with the streaming of unearthly flames. Stricken phantom hosts scattered in panic terror along the spines of the mountains; crags of burning sulphur toppled down upon them in obliterating thunder; the mountains themselves seemed to collapse upon flying armies of spectres; and of the actual and substantial fugitives who sought among the rocks for some cover from this spectacle there was none whose heart was not squeezed and ruptured by the cold hand of fear. Our friends watched in silence until the cynical and jocular fireworks came to an end in fitful lightning and muttering thunder. The terror of the Dragon was in their minds. But there were two in whom terror had no place. 49 They did not at once enter the paradise that was now theirs. They did not even speak of it to each other. They pondered the golden future in secret, and only sometimes, by a glance more subtly effective than kisses, acknowledged that their blood ran to the same rhythm. For those who feed their hearts on the substance of eternity there is no haste. At last, on a spring morning, the _Floating Leaf_ lay in Southampton Water. They stood at the rail, the two of them, looking at the bed of smokestacks, masts and cranes that flourished in the Hampshire foreshore. It was necessary that something should be said, now that this daily companionship was to end. He regarded her steadfastly. The corners of her mouth were turned up, and she smiled faintly at the water. “You are making a fox-face,” he observed. “I was thinking of the Valley.” “Pleasantly?” “Oh, very pleasantly! But how far away it seems, and how strange the things we all talked about, even the words we used! They would sound comic in this atmosphere. Was it real, or did we dream it? Or is this unreal, England and these liners and railways?” “All life is unreal, as you and I know,” he answered her. “We accept it, because we must; but sometimes reality is felt. It sticks through, and the world seems queer beside it. You and I have it for always in our hearts.” “That is true,” she said, “even if we dreamt, even if we did really for a time live in a landscape on a vase or a silk. But how did it come to you, this experience of unbreakable, calm joy that has come to me?” “I came by it years back, in war and disaster.” “Why do you and I have it, and not the others?”