The cavern was not so utterly dark. The circle of the orifice was sharply lit with gray.... They lost track of the hours; for moments at a time forgot physical distress, since they had known only mystic journeys before.... They whispered the fate of Saint Pierre--a city's soul torn from the shrieking flesh; shadows lifted from the mystery of the little wine-shop; clearly they saw how the occultist, his magnetism crippled, had used Jacques and Soronia; and Charter recalled now where he had seen the face of Paula before--the photograph in the Bellingham-cabin on the _Panther_.... A second cloudburst cooled and eased them, though they stood in water.... It seemed that Peter Stock should have made an effort to reach them by this time. Save that the gray was unchangeable in the roof the world, Charter could not have believed that this was all one day. The power which had devastated the city, and with unspent violence swept the _Morne_, might have reached three leagues at sea!... Above all these probabilities arose their happiness. "It seems that I've become a little boy," he said, "on one of those perfect Christmas mornings. Don't you remember, the greatest moment of all--coming downstairs, partly dressed, into the room _They_ had made ready? That moment, before you actually see--just as you enter the mingled dawn and fire-light and catch the first glisten of the tree?... I'm afraid, Paula Linster, you have found----" "A boy," she whispered. Her face was very close in the gray.... "The loved dream-boy. The boy went away to meet sternness and suffering and mazes of misdirection--had to compromise with the world to fit at all. Ah, I have waited long, and the man has come back to me--a boy." "_La Montagne Pelée_ is artistic." "It may be in this marvellous world, where men carry on their wars and their wooings," she went on strangely, "some pursuing their little ways of darkness, some bursting into blooms of valor and tenderness;--it may be that two of Earth's people, after a dreadful passage through agony and terror, have been restored to each other--as we are. It may be that in the roll of Earth's tableaux, another such film is curled away from another age and another cataclysm."