The words reached his ears from an enormous distance. They came travelling to him over rivers, over mountains, over forests; and as they took shape in his consciousness, something quite different from what he had felt for her swelled up in his throat. He took her head between his hands and kissed her as he had never in his life kissed any woman.

“Lob will hear it,” he said with a rough, happy laugh. “But let him hear it! What does it matter now?”

But she moved a few paces away and he watched her whitish shadowily-blurred face as if it had been the face of an immortal.

And he knew, without seeing that it was so, that her expression as she whistled was like the expression of a child asleep, or of a child happily, peacefully dead.