The fire had touched her hair.... Her bare arm brushed his cheek, and his whole nature suddenly crawled with the fear that she might not wake. His head dropped to her breast, and he heard her heart, light and steadily on its way. His eyes were straining through the darkness into her face, but he could not be sure it was without burns. There was cumulative harshness in the fear that her face, so fragile, of purest line, should meet the coarse element, burning dirt. His hands were not free, but he touched her eyes, and knew that they were whole.... She sighed, stirred and winced a little--breath of consciousness returning. Then he heard: "What is this dripping darkness?" The words were slowly uttered, and the tones soft and vague, as from one dreaming, or very close to the Gates.... In a great dark room somewhere, in a past life, perhaps, he had heard such a voice from someone lying in the shadows. "We are in the old cistern--you and I----" "I--knew--you--would--come--for--me." It was murmured as from someone very weary, very happy--as a child falling asleep after a dream, murmurs with a little contented nestle under the mother-wing. "But how could you know?" he whispered quickly. "My heart was too full--to take a mere mountain seriously--until the last minute----" "_Skylarks--always--know!_" * * * * * Torrents of rain were descending. Pelée roared with the after-pangs. Though cooled and replenished by floods of black rain, the rising water in the cistern was still hot. "It was always hard for me to call you Wyndam----" "Harder to hear, Quentin Charter...." "But are you sure you are not badly burned?" he asked for the tenth time. "I don't feel badly burned.... I was watching for you from the window in my room. I didn't like the way my hair looked, and was changing it when I saw you coming--and the Black behind you. I tried to fasten it with one pin, as I ran downstairs.... It fell. It is very thick and kept the fire from me----" "From us." He would have preferred his share of the red dust. She shivered contentedly. "What little is burned will grow again. Red mops invariably do." " ... And to think I should have found the old cistern in the night!... One night when I could not sleep, I walked out here and explored. The idea came then----" "I watched you from the upper window.... The shutter wiggled as you went away. It was the next day that the 'fraids got me. You rushed off to the mountain." Often they verged like this beyond the borders of rational quotation. One hears only the voices, not the words often, from Rapture's Roadway. "Just as I begin to think of something Pelée erupts all over again in my skull----" "I didn't know men understood headache matters.... Don't you think--don't you really think--I might be allowed to stand a little bit?" "Water's still too hot," he replied briefly.