He looked at the little hand once more, no longer limp but clenched against his breast.

And he knew that the end was close at hand, and he spoke again, forcing her to her victory.
"Dearest, you must choose--" "Garry!" "Between those others--and me--" She shrank out of his arms, turned with a sob, swayed, and sank on her knees beside the bed, burying her head in her crossed arms.
This was her answer; and with it he went away into the darkness, reeling, groping, while every pulse in him hammered ironic salutation to the victor who had loved too well to win.

And in his whirling brain sounded the mocking repetition of his own words: "Nothing is lost through love! Nothing is lost--nothing--nothing!"-- flouting, taunting him who had lost love itself there on the firing line, for a comrade's sake.
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.