But I don't think she saw what I think I saw. Let us say that the scrub was treacherous, that it betrayed his foot; it makes no difference now, for I have no son. Why, after all, go forward again if going forward meant no more than that four-seconds pilgrimage from which he had but that moment returned? Better as it was, neither forward nor back nor standing still on that edge of masonry or on any other edge. He drew her close to him. Their lips met.... "_Oh, Lord, Thou hast prevented him with sweetness; he asked life of Thee and Thou hast given him length of days._" We heard the parting of the bushes down below.... A yard beyond the mountain-ash the butterflies continued to hover, and past them the silver-flashing stretch of canal-lock by Tressaint could be seen once more. EPILOGUE I stood before the Tower at the Château de la Garaye. No thrashing-gin sounded, for the day's work was over, and in and out of the empty windows of the glimmering Renaissance ruin the bats flitted. Madge, Alec and I were leaving France to-morrow. There was nothing further to do, there is nothing further to write. I shall never re-visit Dinan. But I did not enter their Tower. I should hardly have done so even had not that which showed in the saffron sky seemed to forbid me. For it seemed to me the perfect symbol of his end. It was the old moon in the new one's arms. Just so, just like that curved golden thread, so thin that a few minutes before it had not been to be seen--just so had that tender crescent of his youth held that dim and gibbous and ghostly round of his past. Just so he had been haggardly haunted, but touched with golden innocence in the end. And he himself seemed to me to be peeping into that Tower which I did not enter, as for ages other crescents had peeped when the doves had filled that hollow with their crooning and no other sound had broken the hush of eve. And thenceforward he would always re-visit it, embracing with a gilded edge the whole dark content of man. But they lay elsewhere. They are not together, but side by side. Alec would not have it otherwise, and Madge did not seem greatly to care. The parallelism of their fair young bodies is the closing parallelism of this book. On his stone is a discrepancy that commonly passes as a carver's error. They lie thus: JANET AIRD DERWENT ROSE b. 1903 d. 1920 b. 1875 d. 1920 at the Château de Beaumanoir at the same Time and Place aged 17 years aged 16 years R.I.P. * * * * * TRANSCRIBER NOTES: Punctuation has been corrected silently. Alternate spellings have been retained as well as some possible typos other than those listed below. page 001, typo "Side-slip" vs "Sidestep" has been retained in the TOC page 076, "hansome" changed to "hansom" (and the hansom with)