At last, the paroxysm past, he sank back again into his old apathetic attitude of watching, the attitude he had so often kept beside his sylvan crucible.
In this attitude and in silence he waited for the dawn.
It came with a hush in the storm; it came with blue openings in the broken up and tumbled heavens; it came with stars that glistened first, and then paled, and at last sank drowning in those deep cerulean lakes; it came with those cerulean lakes broadening into vaster seas, whose shores expanded at last into one illimitable ocean, cerulean no more, but flecked with crimson and opal dyes; it came with the lightly lifted misty curtain of the day, torn and rent on crag and pine-top, but always lifting, lifting.

It came with the sparkle of emerald in the grasses, and the flash of diamonds in every spray, with a whisper in the awakening woods, and voices in the traveled roads and trails.
The sound of these voices stopped before the pit, and seemed to interrogate the old man.

He came, and, putting his finger on his lips, made a sign of caution.

When three or four men had descended he bade them follow him, saying, weakly and disjointedly, but persistently: "My boy--my son Robert--came home--came home at last--here with Flip--both of them--come and see!" He had reached a little niche or nest in the hillside, and stopped, and suddenly drew aside a blanket.

Beneath it, side by side, lay Flip and Lance, dead, with their cold hands clasped in each other's.
"Suffocated!" said two or three, turning with horror toward the broken up and still smouldering pit.
"Asleep!" said the old man.