She knew him instantly, and her black eyes fiercened; as he came up close to her she said without any greeting: "I lost him, your honour--him and my Bill in the same blasted year, and I ain't never had no other."

Paul stopped and peered into her brown face in the fading light.

"So we have been both through hell since then, my poor girl?" he said.

The gipsy woman laughed with bitter harshness as she echoed back the one word "Hell!"--and afterwards she added with a wail: "Yes, they're dead! and there won't be never no meeting."

And Paul went on--but her face haunted him.

Was there the same hard change in himself, he wondered? Was he, too, brutalised and branded with the five years of hell? Surely if so he had gone on a lower road than his darling would have had him travel.

Then out of the mist of the dying day came the memory of her noble face as it had been in that happy hour when they had floated out to the lagoon, and she had told him--her eyes alight with the feu sacré--her wishes for his future.

But what had he done to carry them out--those lofty wishes? Surely nothing. For, obsessed with his own selfish anguish, he had lived on with no single worthy aim, with no aim at all except to forget and deaden his suffering.