“No, I don’t think so.”  Scott spoke very softly, with the utmost tenderness, into her ear.  “Don’t you realize,” he said, “that we belong to each other?  Could there possibly be anyone else for either you or me?”

She did not answer him; only she clung a little closer.  And, after a moment, as she felt the drawing of his hold, “Don’t kiss me—–­yet!” she begged him tremulously.  “Let us wait till—­the morning!”

His arms relaxed, “It is very near the morning now,” he said.  “Shall we go and watch for it?”

They rose together.  Dinah’s eyes sought his for one shy, fleeting second, falling instantly as if half-dazzled, half-afraid.  He took her hand and led her quietly from the room.

It was no longer dark in the passage outside.  A pearly light was growing.  The splash of the sea sounded very far below them, as the dim surging of a world unseen might rise to the watchers on the mountain-top.

They moved to an open window at the end of the passage.  No sound came from Isabel’s room close by, and after a few seconds Scott turned noiselessly aside and entered.

Dinah remained at the open window waiting with a throbbing heart in the great silence that wrapped the world.  She was not afraid, but she longed for Scott to come back; she was conscious of an urgent need of him.

Several moments passed, and then softly he returned.  “No change!” he whispered.  “Eustace will call us—­when it comes.”

She slipped her hand back into his, without speaking.  He made her sit upon the window-seat, and knelt himself upon it, his arm about her shoulders, his fingers clasping hers.

She could see his face but vaguely in the dimness, but many times during that holy hour before the dawn, though he spoke no word, she felt that he was praying or giving thanks.

Slowly the twilight turned into a velvet dusk.  The great Change was drawing near.  The silence lay like a thinning veil of mist upon the mountain-top.  The clouds were parting in the East, all tinged with gold, like burnished gates flung back for the royal coming of the sun-god.  The stillness that lay upon all the waiting earth was sacred as the hush of prayer.

Their faces were turned towards the spreading glow.  It shone upon them as it shone upon all beside, widening, intensifying, till the whole earth lay wrapped in solemn splendour—­and then at last, through the open gates, red, royal, triumphant, the sun-god came.

There came a moment in which all things were touched with the glory, all things were made new.  And in that moment, sudden as a flash of light, a bird of pure white plumage appeared before their eyes, hovered an instant; then flew, mounting on wide, gleaming wings, straight into the dawn....

Even while they watched, it vanished through the gates of gold.  And only the gracious sunshine of a new day remained....

A low voice spoke from the chamber of Death.  They turned from the vision and saw Eustace standing in the doorway.