the next moment Anne’s arms are round his neck and her lips against his, and the barrier between them is swept away, and the deep waters of their love rush together.

With that kiss they enter a new life whereinto one may not follow them.  One thinks it must have been a life made strangely beautiful by self-forgetfulness, strangely sweet by mutual devotion—a life too ideal, perhaps, to have remained for long undimmed by the mists of earth.

They who remember them at that time speak of them in hushed tones, as one speaks of visions.  It would almost seem as though from their faces in those days there shone a radiance, as though in their voices dwelt a tenderness beyond the tenderness of man.

They seem never to rest, never to weary.  Day and night, through that little stricken world, they come and go, bearing healing and peace, till at last the plague, like some gorged beast of prey, slinks slowly back towards its lair, and men raise their heads and breathe.

One afternoon, returning from a somewhat longer round than usual, John feels a weariness creeping into his limbs, and quickens his step, eager to reach home and rest.  Anne, who has been up all the previous night, is asleep, and not wishing to disturb her, he goes into the dining-room and sits down in the easy chair before the fire.  The room strikes cold.  He stirs the logs, but they give out no greater heat.  He draws his chair right in front of them, and sits leaning over them with his feet on the hearth and his hands outstretched towards the blaze; yet he still shivers.

Twilight fills the room and deepens into dusk.  He wonders listlessly how it is that Time seems to be moving with such swift strides.  After a while he hears a voice close to him, speaking in a slow, monotonous tone—a voice curiously familiar to him, though he cannot tell to whom it belongs.  He does not turn his head, but sits listening to it drowsily.  It is talking about tallow: one hundred and ninety-four casks of tallow, and they must all stand one inside the other.  It cannot be done, the voice complains pathetically.  They will not go inside each other.  It is no good pushing them.  See! they only roll out again.

The voice grows wearily fretful.  Oh! why do they persist when they see it is impossible?  What fools they all are!

Suddenly he recollects the voice, and starts up and stares wildly about him, trying to remember where he is.  With a fierce straining of his will he grips the brain that is slipping away from him, and holds it.  As soon as he feels sure of himself he steals out of the room and down the stairs.

In the hall he stands listening; the house is very silent.  He goes to the head of the stairs leading to the kitchen and calls softly to the old housekeeper, and she comes up to him, panting and grunting as she climbs each step.  Keeping some distance from her, he asks in a whisper where Anne is.  The woman answers that she is in the hospital.

“Tell her I have been called away suddenly on business,” he says, speaking in quick, low tones: “I shall be away for some days.  Tell her to leave here and return home immediately.  They can do without her here now.  Tell her to go back home at once.  I will join her there.”

He moves toward the door but stops and faces round again.

“Tell her I beg and entreat her not to stop in this place an hour longer.  There is nothing to keep her now.  It is all over: there is nothing that cannot be done by any one.  Tell her she must go home—this very night.  Tell her if she loves me to leave this place at once.”

The woman, a little bewildered by his vehemence, promises, and disappears down the stairs.  He takes his hat and cloak from the chair on which he had thrown them, and turns once more to cross the hall.  As he does so, the door opens and Anne enters.

He darts back into the shadow, squeezing himself against the wall.  Anne calls to him laughingly, then, as he does not answer, with a frightened accent:

“John,—John, dear.  Was not that you?  Are not you there?”

He holds his breath, and crouches still closer into the dark corner; and Anne, thinking she must have been mistaken in the dim light, passes him and goes upstairs.

Then he creeps stealthily to the door, lets himself out and closes it softly behind him.

After the lapse of a few minutes the old housekeeper plods upstairs and delivers John’s message.  Anne, finding it altogether incomprehensible, subjects the poor dame to severe examination, but fails to elicit anything further.  What is the meaning of it?  What “business” can have compelled John, who for ten weeks has never let the word escape his lips, to leave her like this—without a word! without a kiss!  Then suddenly she remembers the incident of a few moments ago, when she had called to him, thinking she saw him, and he did not answer; and the whole truth strikes her full in the heart.

She refastens the bonnet-strings she has been slowly untying, and goes down and out into the wet street.

She makes her way rapidly to the house of the only doctor resident in the neighbourhood—a big, brusque-mannered man, who throughout these terrible two months has been their chief stay and help.  He meets her on her entrance with an embarrassed air that tells its own tale, and at once renders futile his clumsy attempts at acting:—

How should he know where John is?  Who told her John had the fever—a great, strong, hulking fellow like that?  She has been working too hard, and has got fever on the brain.  She must go straight back home, or she will be having it herself.  She is more likely to take it than John.

Anne, waiting till he has finished jerking out sentences while stamping up and down the room, says gently, taking no notice of his denials,—“If you will not tell me I must find out from some one else—that is all.”  Then, her quick eyes noting his momentary hesitation, she lays her little hand on his rough paw, and, with the shamelessness of a woman who loves deeply, wheedles everything out of him that he has promised to keep secret.

He stops her, however, as she is leaving the room.  “Don’t go in to him now,” he says; “he will worry about you.  Wait till to-morrow.”

So, while John lies counting endless casks of tallow, Anne sits by his side, tending her last “case.”

Often in his delirium he calls her name, and she takes his fevered hand in hers and holds it, and he falls asleep.

Each morning the doctor comes and looks at him, asks a few questions and gives a few commonplace directions, but makes no comment.  It would be idle his attempting to deceive her.

The days move slowly through the darkened room.  Anne watches his thin hands grow thinner, his sunken eyes grow bigger; yet remains strangely calm, almost contented.

Very near the end there comes an hour when John wakes as from a dream, and remembers all things clearly.

He looks at her half gratefully, half reproachfully.

“Anne, why are you here?” he asks, in a low, laboured voice.  “Did they not give you my message?”

For answer she turns her deep eyes upon him.

“Would you have gone away and left me here to die?” she questions him, with a faint smile.

She bends her head down nearer to him, so that her soft hair falls about his face.

“Our lives were one, dear,” she whispers to him.  “I could not have lived without you; God knew that.  We shall be together always.”

She kisses him, and laying his head upon her breast, softly strokes it as she might a child’s; and he puts his weak arms around her.

Later on she feels them growing cold about her, and lays him gently back upon the bed, looks for the last time into his eyes, then draws the lids down over them.

His people ask that they may bury him in the churchyard hard by, so that he may always be among them; and, Anne consenting, they do all things needful with their own hands, wishful that