Regan returned to the palace as the darkness was deepening. The lamps in the great hall were unlit. Probably the bird women were asleep, but he knew it was not that. Into the silent rooms he hastened. Not there! No fire! No light! He ran to Father Renaudin’s apartments. There lay Father Renaudin asleep! “Awake! awake!” With a groan of agony Regan called to him. With a curse of rage he shook him, shrieking at the senseless form: “Awake! awake! you sleeping traitor, and tell me where is the wife whom I left with you!” As well trouble the dead! Gone, gone, gone! Regan rushed through the corridor with a flaming torch, heedlessly stumbling on the sleepers lying wherever they had fallen, heedless of the fact that the cold was chilling the fireless palace. “Rondah, come back! Rondah, come back!” He repeated that call from the verandas; possibly she had not gone far; she might hear. He lighted a great lamp in the glass tower. She would perhaps see the lamp and return. A white note lay on the floor. He seized it. “Good-bye” was written on it. “Good-bye! Good-bye!” Not for him those words! He held the letters far from him and looked at them. “Good-bye!” Rondah’s writing. Rondah’s paper, with the crown in the corner. She had written on it “Good-bye!” Staggering to a chair, Regan sat before the ash-covered hearth and crushed the white ghost of love in his powerful hand. The cold was creeping all around him; he noted it not; a worse chill was on his heart. He was fighting against human suspicion with the remembrance of human love! There it was to condemn her. “Good-bye!” In his heart was untold misery, but in his long life he had gained in many things more than human wisdom. “It looks like treachery! It looks like desertion!” he admitted; “but in thirty-three hopeless years on Earth she did not forget me! Can she forget in a day here! A doom—that was what Father Renaudin called it. It could not be averted. It was to fall on Rondah; this has fallen on me!” “Good-bye! Good-bye!” But where would she go? That other man, the one who walked on the cliffs! Regan had never seen him; but Father Renaudin had seen him and had reported to Regan his wonderful, God-like beauty. “The Sun Island! Perhaps she is there!” Regan rushed into the night; darkness was there; he could see nothing, but he cared for nothing. The winds cut like a keen knife, but a knife more cruel had cut his heart. “Good-bye! Good-bye!” The winds howled those words. They would say nothing else. “Rondah, Rondah,” he whispered to the night, “it would have been better not to have written it—‘Good-bye!’” He saw the blaze of light of the Sun Island; he climbed the cliffs to his own stone house. The bird people looked like corpses in the gray light. He drank a stimulating liquid. He lighted the firewood which he had ordered so carefully piled to make a great, cheerful blaze for Rondah. He sat beside this blaze and waited for the whitening of darkness, which was day.