"Oh, oh! this is it!--_this is man!_ It isn't _my_ love that you want; it isn't the little one-grained thing that the Angel of Life takes from out of Heaven's granary and scatters into the human soul; it is the great Everlasting, a sempiternity of love, that _you_ want, Herbert!" "And you can't give it to me?" "No, I will ask it for you; and you will ask it for yourself?" "Only tell me how." "You know how to ask for human love." "Yours, yes; but then I haven't sinned against you." "Have you not, Herbert?" "Well,--but not in the same way. I haven't gone beyond the measure of your affection, I feel that it is larger than my sin, or I could not be here." "Tell me how you know this. What is the feeling like?" "What is it like? Why, when I come to you, I don't forever feel it rising up with a thousand speary heads that shut you out; it drowns in your presence; the surface is cool and clear, and I can look down, down, into the very heart of my sin, like that strange lake we looked into one day,--do you remember it?--the huge branches and leafless trunks of gigantic pines coming up stirless and distinct almost to the surface; and do you remember the little island there, and the old tradition that it was the feasting-place of a tribe of red men, who displeased the Great Spirit by their crimes, and in direful punishment, one day, when they were assembled on their mountain, it suddenly gave way beneath them, and all were drowned in the flood of waters that rushed up, except one good old squaw who occupied one of the peaks that is now the island?" "And so I am the good old squaw?" said the lady. "For all that I can see in the darkness." "But that makes me better than the many who lie below;--the squaw was good, you remember. But how did she get off of the island? Pity tradition didn't tell us. Loon's Island, in Lake Mashapaug in Killingly, wasn't it?" A little silence came, broken by the words,-- "It's so long since I have been with you!" "Yes, and it's time that I was gone." "Not a few moments more?--not even to go back to the old subject?" "No,--it's wrong,--it perils you. You put away your sin when you come to the little drop of my love; go and hide it forever in the sea that every hour washes at your feet." "You'll write?" "I will." I heard a sound below, like the drawing of a match across a stone; then a faint bit of glimmer flickered a moment. I couldn't see where they were. I bent forward a little, in vain. "My last match," said the lady. "What shall we do? We can't go through in the darkness." "We must. I will go first. Give me your hand. Now, three steps down, then on; come,--fear nothing." A heavy sound, as of some ponderous weight let fall, and I knew that the only living soul in there was hers who sat with hands fast hold of frosty bars, high up in the window of the tower. I left fragments of the skin of my fingers upon the cold iron, in pay for the woollen bit I had taken thence.