"What I am going to tell you is so marvellous that you will probably refuse to believe it," he said, after narrating the incident of the sign upon the metal box which had arrested the uplifted weapons of the unsparing Ba-gcatya, and, of course, editing out all that might have revealed the real nature of the expedition. "I have never breathed one word of it to any living being--not even to those who were with me. I would rather you did not either, Lilith, because it is too strange for anybody to believe, and--for other reasons." She gave the required promise, and he drew forth the box. At sight of this relic of the past, that sweet, entrancing, if profitless past--Lilith could no longer quite keep herself in hand. The tears welled forth, falling upon the metal box itself--hallowing, as it were, the sweet charm of its saving power. "Your love had power to save one life, you see," he went on in a cold, even voice, intended to strengthen him against himself. "But look, now--see those marks on the lid, just discernible? Now--listen." And Lilith did listen; and at the description of the awful rock prison, with its skeleton bones, the long hours of helpless suspense and despair--and the final struggle in the ghastly moonlight; the struggle for life with the appalling monster that tenanted it, her eyes dilated with horror, and with pallid face and gasping lips she begged him not to go on, so great a hold did the incident take upon her imagination, even there, in the blaze of the broad midday sunlight. "I have done now," he said. "Well, Lilith--you see what that token of your love has rescued me from. It was given as an amulet or charm, and right well has it fulfilled its purpose. But--to what end?" "Did you--did you come back with what you went for," she broke forth at last, as with an effort. "Yes. Therein, too, you proved yourself a true prophet. And now tell me something about yourself." "Were you--angry with me when you heard what I had done, Laurence?" she said, raising her eyes full to his. "Angry? No. Why should I be? Your life is your own, though, as a rule, sacrificing ones' self to save somebody else, as your aunt rather gave me to understand was the case here, is lamentably apt to turn out a case of throwing away one's life with both hands. It is too much like cutting one's own throat to save somebody else from being hanged." "And is that your way of wishing me well, Laurence?" she said reproachfully. "No. I wish you nothing but well. It would be futile to say 'happiness,' I suppose." "The happiness of doing one's duty is a hard kind of happiness, after all," she said, with a sad little smile.