“Hope! Of course I hope. You could never make me stop hoping--not even if you broke my heart. You may call it a mirage if you like--that’s only a word. I’ll fill your trance with my mirage, I’ll flood your whiteness with my color, and, God grant, you will feel life and know that you are at last awake. You are right--life _is_ endless contest, endless pain; it’s only at that price that we can have it; but you will know that it’s worth the price. I see it all, Gavan, and I accept. I accept not only the certainty of my own suffering, but the certainty of yours.” Through the night they gazed at each other, his infinite sadness, her infinite valor. Their faces were like strange, beautiful dreams--dreams holding in their dimness such deep, such vivid significance. They more saw the significance--that sadness, that valor--than its embodiment in eyes and lips. It was finally with a sense of realization so keen that it trembled on the border of oblivion, of the fainting from over-consciousness, that Gavan once more laid his head upon her breast. He, too, accepting, held her close,--held her and all that she signified, while, leaning above him, her cheek against his hair, she said in a voice that over its depth upon depth of steadiness trembled at last a little: “I see it all. Imagine what a faith it is that is willing to make the thing it loves most in the whole world suffer--suffer horribly--so that it may live.” He gave a long sigh. At its height emotion dissolved into a rapt contemplation. “How beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful?” she repeated, with almost a gentle mockery for the word. “Well, begin with beauty if you will. You will find that--and more besides--as an end of it all.” VII She left him in the garden. They had talked quietly, of the past, of their childhood, and, as quietly, of the future--their immediate marriage and departure for long, wonderful voyages together. His head lay on her breast, and often, while they spoke of that life together, of the homecoming to Cheylesford Lodge and when he heard her voice tremble a little, he kissed the dear hand he held. When she rose at last and stood before him, he said, still holding her hands, that he would sit on there in the darkness and think of her. She felt the languor of his voice and told him that he was very tired and would do much better to go to bed and forget about her till morning; but, looking up at her, he shook his head, smiling: “I couldn’t sleep.” So she left him; but, before she went, after the last gazing pause in which there seemed now no discord, no strife, nothing to hide or to threaten, she had suddenly put her arms around his neck, bending to him and murmuring, “Oh, I love you.” “I seem to have loved you forever, Eppie,” he said. But, once more, in all the strange oblivion of his acceptance, there had been for him in their kiss and their embrace the undertone of anguish, the distant tolling--as if for something accomplished, over forever--of a funeral bell.