not suffer me to ask more,--neither could I at any time after find heart to beseech her further regarding matters she was not fain to converse of. Yet ever and anon she bade me well beware that I should not trust myself to stray alone into the deep dimness beyond the dale of the fountains: '_Lest the Shadows lay hold upon thee_,' she said. And I laughed low at her words, never discerning that the Shadows whereof she spake were those that Age and Death cast athwart the sunshine of the world. ['Nay, nay, my son,' again spoke the priest; 'tell me not of Shadows, but of thy great sins only; for the night waneth, and thine hour is not far off.'] Be not fearful, father; I may not die before I have told thee all.... I have spoken of our happiness; now must I tell thee of our torment--the strangest thing of all? Dost remember what I related to thee about the sound of the trumpet summoning me? Now was it not a ghostly thing that I should hear every midnight that same summons,--not faintly as before, but loud and long--once? Night after night, ever at the same hour, and ever with the same sonority, even when lying in her arms, I heard it--as a voice of brass, rolling through the world. And whensoever that cursed sound came to us, she trembled in the darkness, and linked her arms more tightly about me, and wept, and would not be comforted till I had many times promised that I should not forsake her. And through all those years I heard that trumpet-call--years, said I?--nay, _centuries_ (since in that place there is not any time nor any age)--I heard it through long centuries after all my comrades had been laid within their graves. [And the stranger gazed with strange inquiry into the priest's face; but he crossed himself silently, and spoke no word.] And nightly I strove to shut out the sound from my ears and could not; and nightly the torment of hearing it ever increased like a torment of hell--_ay de mit_ nightly, for uncounted generations of years! So that in time a great fury would seize me whenever the cursed echoes came; and, one dark hour, when she seemed to hear it not, and slept deeply, I sought my rusted blade, and betook me toward the sound,--beyond the dale of fountains--into the further dimness of swaying mosses,--whither, meseems, the low land trendeth southward and toward those wan wastes which are not land nor water, yet which do quake to a great and constant roaring as of waves in wrath. [A moment the voice of the aged man failed him, and his frame quivered as in the beginning of agony.]