His room was palely luminous with the lustre of the night.  On the mantel squatted a little wizened and gilded god peering and leering at him through the shadows—­Malcourt’s parting gift—­the ugliest of the nineteen.

“For,” said Malcourt—­“there ought to be only eighteen by rights—­unless further complications arise; and this really belongs to you, anyway.”

So he left the thing on Hamil’s mantel, although the latter had no idea what Malcourt meant, or why he made the parting offering.

Now he stood there staring at it like a man whose senses waver, and who fixes some object to steady nerve and brain.

Far in the night the voice of the ocean stirred the silence—­the ocean which had given her to him that day in the golden age of fable when life and the world were young together, and love wore a laughing mask.

He listened; all the night was sighing with the sigh of the surf; and the breeze in the trees mourned; and the lustre died out in thickening darkness as he stood there, listening.

Then all around him through the hushed obscurity a vague murmur grew, accentless, sad, interminable; and through the monotone of the falling rain he heard the ocean very far away washing the body of a young world dead to him for ever.

* * * * *

Crouched low beside her bed, face quivering in her arms, she heard, in the stillness, the call of the sea—­that enchanted sea which had given him to her that day, when Time and the World were young together in the blessed age of dreams.

And she heard the far complaint of the surf, breaking unsatisfied; and a strange wind flowing through the trees; then silence, suspense; and the world’s dark void slowly filling with the dreadful monotone of the rain.

* * * * *

Storm after storm of agony and doubt swept her; she prayed convulsively, at random, reiterating incoherence in blind, frightened repetition till the stupefying sequence lost all meaning.

Exhausted, half-senseless, her hands still clung together, her tear-swollen lips still moved to form his name, asking God’s mercy on them both.  But the end had come.

[Illustration:  “Then fell prone, head buried in her tumbled hair.”]

Yes, the end; she knew it now—­understood what had happened, what must be.  And, knowing, she heard the sea-rain whispering their judgment, and the winds repeating it across the wastes.

She raised her head, dumb, rigid, listening, and stared through the shaking window into obscurity.  Lightning flickered along the rim of the world—­a pallid threat above the sea—­the sea which had given them to one another and left them stranded in each other’s arms there on the crumbling edges of destruction.

Her strained eyes divined, her straining senses comprehended; she cringed lower, aghast, swaying under the menace, then fell prone, head buried in her tumbled hair.