As she made her way slowly towards the staircase, absorbed in rather bitter thoughts, a slight sound caught her ear—­a sudden stir of movement.  Then, out of the dim shadows of the hall, someone came towards her—­someone who limped a little as he came.

“Nan!”

For an instant her heart seemed to stop beating.  The quiet, drawling voice was Peter’s, no longer harsh with anger, nor stern with the enforced repression of a love that was forbidden, but tender and enfolding as it had been that moonlit night amid the ruins of King Arthur’s Castle.

“Peter! . . .  Peter! . . .”

She ran blindly towards him, whispering his name.

How it had happened she neither knew nor cared—­all that mattered was that Peter was here, waiting for her!  And as his arms closed round her, and his voice uttered the one word:  “Beloved!” she knew that every barrier was down between them and that the past, with all its blunders and effort and temptations, had been wiped out.

Presently she leaned away from him.

“Peter, I used to wonder why God kept us apart.  I almost lost my faith—­once.”

Peter’s steady, blue-grey eyes met hers.

“Beloved,” he said, “I think we can see why, even now.  Isn’t our love . . . which we’ve fought to keep pure and clean . . . been crucified for . . . a thousand times better and finer thing than the love we might have snatched at and taken when it wasn’t ours to take?”

She smiled up at him, a tender gravity in her face.  Her thoughts slipped back to the little song which seemed to hold so strange a symbolism of her own life.  The third verse had come true at last.  She repeated it aloud, very softly: 

  “But sometimes God on His great white Throne
    Looks down from the Heaven above,
  And lays in the hands that are empty
    The tremulous Star of Love.”

Peter stooped and kissed her lips.  There was a still, quiet passion in his kiss, but there was something more—­something deep and intransmutable—­the same unchanging troth which, he had given her at Tintagel of love that would last “through this world into the next.”

THE END