Val, usually so ready of tongue, was seized upon by silence. Ethan, too, sat speechless, struggling with the sense of keen-edged wretchedness that pressed knife-like on his heart. How was he to say good-bye? and--with a long look down the road--how was he to live afterwards? She--oh, she would console herself; she was very young. But for him ... the immense dead weight of life pressed intolerably hard. The futility of it extinguished the very sun. Presently, as they sat there so silent, Val bowed her head, hiding her face in her hands. It shot through him that some realization had come to her of the unseen forces that make of us their sport--some vision of the bitter absurdity of the pigmy human lot we make such a pother about. The sense of a vision shared, of a common pain, merged swiftly into physical yearning. The physical yearning cried aloud for assurance that it, too, was "common." He looked down upon the bowed head and the little white nape of her neck. He noticed how out of the upturned swaths of firm-bound hair the wild love-locks were falling--locks so fine that they looked like faint wavy shadows falling over the ears. Had she any faintest notion of the hunger in him that would not let him sleep? As he bent over her the white neck was suffused with rose. Ah, she knew! The traitor blood had signalled him behind her back. "Kiss me, dear," he whispered. Had she heard? The little ears glowed scarlet. "Dear--" He slipped his hand under her chin, and turned her face to him. The curtaining lids still hid her eyes, but the lashes quivered, and that odd little pulse in her upper lip, that was beating, too, "piteously," he said to himself. "Look at me, dear. Val, open your eyes, I say." She did. It was like a shaft of sunshine; the rapture of the look startled him. He would have been prepared for tears, but this cloudless joy-- Ah, she was very young! "Kiss me, child." He did not bend towards her. She should come to him for this last greeting that was the first as well. The radiant face, flushing, paling, came closer. He felt the breath from out her parted lips. But the sweetness of her nearness could not for him wipe out the fact that before them lay parting and long heartache. "Good-bye," he said, brokenly. She drew back before the kiss was more than inhaled. "Good-bye!" she echoed. "No; I will never kiss you 'good-bye'" She freed herself from his prisoning arms. "Never, never, never!" She sprang up. "To get that kiss from me you must be lying dead." And she fled out of the room. A little later he made his farewells to the assembled household in the hall. Having kissed Emmie, he turned to Val. She grasped his hand as she averted her white face, whispering: "I will kiss you when you come again." CHAPTER XXV