Page:Daskam Bacon--Whom the gods destroy.djvu/77

 great oak that lay just as it had fallen that night. Beneath all the confused tumult of his thoughts one clear truth rang like a bell, one bitter-sweet certainty that caught him smiling strangely as he realised it! "She's won! She's won!"

There, while the branches swayed above him, and the surf, sinister and monotonous, pounded below, the vision that had made them both famous melted into the elusive reality, and he lived again with absolute abandonment that sweet mad night, he felt again her hair blown about his face as he lay on the windy cliff with the lady of his dreams.

For him her fate was not dreadful—she could not have died like other women. There was an intoxication in her sudden taking away: she was rapt out of life as she would have wished, he knew.

Slowly there grew upon him a frightened wonder if she had lived for this. Her actual life had been so empty, so unreal, so concentrated in those piercing stolen moments; she had ended it, once the heart of it had been caught and fixed to give to others faint thrills of all she had felt so utterly.

"She died for it!" he felt, with a kind of awe