And she?  The words, as though they smote her, chased for an instant the rich blood from her cheek.  For a moment the bosom heaved wildly, then the colour came slowly back, and ebbed again.  A soft tremor shook the bending form, the little hand clutched the gown, but she made no answer.

“Speak to me, Claire!  I love you!  With my life and soul I love you.  Can you not care for me?” I took the little hand.  “Claire, my heart is in your hands—­do with it what you will, but speak to me.  Can you not—­do you not—­care for me?”

The head drooped lower yet, the warm fingers quivered within mine, then tightened, and—­

What was that whisper, that less than whisper, for which I bent my head?  Had I heard aright?  Or why was it that the figure drooped closer, and the bird’s note sprang up jubilant?

“Claire!”

A moment—­one tremulous, heart-shaking moment—­and then her form bent to me, abandoned, conquered; her face looked up, then sank upon my breast; but before it sank I read upon it a tenderness and a passion infinite, and caught in her eyes the perfect light of love.

As the glory of delight came flooding on my soul, the sun’s disc dropped, and the first cold shadow of night fell upon earth.  The blackbird uttered a broken “Amen,” and was gone no man knew whither.  The golden ripple passed up the river, and vanished in a leaden grey.  One low shuddering sigh swept through the trees, then all was dumb.  I looked westward.  Towards the horizon the blue of day was fading downwards through indistinguishable zones of purple, amethyst, and palest rose, the whole heaven arching in one perfect rainbow of love.

But while I looked and listened to the beating of that beloved heart girdled with my arm, there grew a something on the western sky that well-nigh turned my own heart to marble.  At first, a lightest shadow—­a mere breath upon heaven’s mirror, no more.  Then as I gazed, it deepened, gathering all shadows from around the pole, heaping, massing, wreathing them around one spot in the troubled west—­a shape that grew and threatened and still grew, until I looked on—­what?

Up from the calm sea of air rose one solitary island, black and looming, rose and took shape and stood out—­the very form and semblance of Dead Man’s Rock!  Sable and real as death it towered there against the pale evening, until its shadow, falling on my heart itself and on the soft brown head that bent and nestled there, lay round us clasped so, and with its frown cursed the morning of our love.

Something in my heart’s beat, or in the stiffening of my arm, must have startled my darling, for as I gazed I felt her stir, and, looking down, caught her eyes turned wistfully upwards.  My lips bent to hers.

“Mine, Claire!  Mine for ever!”

And there, beneath the shadow of the Rock, our lips drew closer, met, and were locked in their first kiss.