"
"Good-bye, then, until we meet," she said in the passionate music of her
voice. "Every beat of my heart will bring me nearer to you. There will
be no other life for me. Soon or late I'll come to you. You believe it.
Say you believe it!"
"I believe it." He bent and kissed her lips. Then his form slackened
away from the arms that clasped it, and sank into the chair. A
policeman's whistle shrilled outside the window. The faintest flicker of
a smile passed over the face of the sleeper.
I took her away, still with that unearthly ecstasy on her face.
* * * * *
The glow of the narrator's cigar waxed, a pin-point of light in a world
of dimness and mystery. Subdued breathing made our silence rhythmic.
When I found my voice, it was hardly more than a whisper.
"Good God! What a tragedy!"
"Tragedy? You think it so?" The Little Red Doctor's gnarled face gleamed
strangely behind the tiny radiance. "Dominie, you have a queer notion of
this life and little faith in the next."
"'She met death as a tryst,'" murmured the old librarian. "And he!
'Trailing clouds of glory!' The triumph of that victory over fate! One
would like to have seen the meeting between them, after the waiting."
The Little Red Doctor rose. "When some brutal and needless tragedy of
the sort that we medical men witness so often shakes my faith in my
kind, I turn to think of those two in the splendor of their last meeting
on earth, the man with the courage to face death, the woman with the
courage to face life.
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