"And so he was killed," said Curtin, speaking with strongly controlled emotion. "And I can tell you that when I heard it I felt physically that shock and crash and mortal bruising. It wasn't only my heart that was wounded. My nerves and my flesh felt it. Even now I think that there must be but one body—I got away for a time after he was buried. I went down to HyÈres. I used to sit there by the sea. He was a lovable fellow, square as they make them. We were brothers and friends, too. Well, that is the way it runs! Life—death. Life—death! I would give a good deal—"

He had been thirty-odd hours at Sweet Rocket. They had sent up mountain to Cliff, who took down to his camp news that he would be gone for some days. They had given him the room next to Linden, and he had become at once delightfully at home.

When with Miss Darcy he had stepped upon the porch Linden had said: "Don't think you take me by surprise! I saw you in my looking-glass this morning!"

"It is good to find you again, Linden! What do you mean by your looking-glass?"

Linden laughed, his hands upon the old classmate's shoulders. "Only that I had been thinking of you. And the other night I was with you by the Sea of Azof. I thought, 'I should like to see him again!' And you know yourself that when you make a current boats appear upon it!"

Now, as the four sat about the fire in the big parlor, before the lamp was lighted, he had been telling of the death of his brother, an aviator. There had followed silence; then, "Well, let us talk of something else!" said Curtin. He took up the pipe he had laid upon the hearth beside him, and raking out a coat from the fire, relit it. "What do you think is going to happen now, Linden?"

They sat and talked, and the flames leaped, many and small, in the mahogany of the room. At ten they rose to separate for the night.

"Come look at the sky," said Linden. "The first week in October, and diamond clear!" They went out to the porch, and then, so majestic was the night, to the sweep before the house, whence they might see the great expanse. It was very still. The river sounded, but the air rested a thin and moveless veil. It was not cold. Richard Linden stood bareheaded, his face uplifted to the vault that writes forever its runes before men.

"By George! I forgot!" thought Curtin. "But doubtless he knows them so well that he knows where they are, season by season." It seemed that it might be so. Linden spoke as though he saw. "See the Pleiades and Capella and Aldebaran! The Great Square is at its height. The Cross and the Eagle and the Lyre. The mountains hide Fomalhaut." They walked a little way upon the road. Immense and tingling was that view, looking outward, looking inward, upon those stars. At last they came indoors and said good night.

Martin Curtin lay in a big four-poster bed and stared out of window. Upon going to bed he had slept quickly and soundly. Now he was awake, and he thought it might be past four of the morning. He felt the subtle turn toward the day. He heard a dog bark and a cock crow. He was aware that he had waked suddenly and completely. He was wide awake, and more than that. There was a keenness, an awareness; keen, sharpened, but also wide. His body lying very still, he began to remember, but it was remembering with a deeper and fuller pulse than was ordinarily the case. He remembered that younger brother who was dead, and not him alone, but many another, kindred and friends and associates. The past lived again, but lived with a difference. What multitudes of kindred, and friends, and associates! The meeting went deep and wide. Had he touched all those in one life or had it been in many lives? Was the whole texture coming alive, and in effect did it include the whole past, the whole dead and gone? However it might be, it was a world transmuted and without pain. He lay still, regarding it. It was strong and light, and he and it grew together with a sense of frictionlessness, of exquisite relief, even with a kind of golden humorousness. None had been truly any better or worse than another, nor in any way miraculously different, and now they could understand and laugh together! The sense of union was exquisite, and the sense of variousness hardly less so. The variousness was without hostility. It glided and turned smoothly, much as personal thought and mood might glide and turn. The sense of well-being flowed in every realm. The perception included environment. Remembered, recalled persons meant remembered, recalled houses, towns, country, forest and river, fields and gardens, a thousand, thousand places! Where were they all? They were all over the earth—light and golden—loved places and the right people in them! There was nothing rigid—even the places understood one another. Curtin felt a profound happiness. This one body, lying at Sweet Rocket, was not wholly forgot nor relinquished. It came into the pattern of variousness. But Curtin himself was moving in a wider consciousness. All these people, all these selves of himself! and he understood their old difficulties and he understood their old misunderstandings. The piece understood, the beautiful tissue! The music understood, the notes moving so richly together! It was throbbing in the present and in the understood, the appropriated past. He never thought, "How grotesque the thought that we are dead!" The thought could not even occur.

For one flash, for less than an instant, the plane lifted. There started forth a high, a tremendous sense of unity—Presence. It towered, it overflowed him, he was of it—then the instant closed. As it had come like a towering wave, so it sank like a wave. But there was left the lasting thrill of it, and there was left undying aspiration. "Ah, to find it again! Ah, if it will come again!"

Where had been sense of the whole, again befell fragmentariness. Loss—great loss—and yet was there falling sweetness, exquisiteness still of order! He felt again the wide world that they said was dead, and yet surely was no such thing. There happened again wide and subtle change. Out of a stillness, a silence, an isolation, exquisite and tingling, a state of clarity and poise, one spoke to him within, "Martin!"

He answered in that space. "Yes, John.... No, grief is absurd!... Just because we're ignorant!"

"You can be content. We can be content."

"Yes, I see! We are all in one, who cannot be destroyed."

There came no more, but the world was a rhythm, swinging, swinging. There reigned great rest and calm. Out of this, with much of it yet clinging, he sank to the square, clean, sparely furnished bedroom at Sweet Rocket, with the cock crowing, with the old clock in the lower hall striking five. Curtin lay very quiet in the big bed. Dawn was coming, but his sense was that of an afterglow. He had felt beauty and still wonder like this in high mountains, watching Alpine glow. It faded and faded, but there was left with him assurance, rest, the sense of a dawn to be, a consciousness behind this consciousness, another consciousness towering, sun-gilt, in the future. He lay very still, at rest, hardly wondering. The great things, the beautiful things, were the natural things. The wholly full and blissful would be the finally natural. Dawn came in rose and amethyst.

When it was full light Curtin left his bed, dressed, and went downstairs. He thought that he would walk by the river or in the garden. The house was still, the front door open. Early though it was, he found Linden on the porch starting forth with Tam. He had found, he said, that he must see Roger Carter, who was riding to-day to Alder and would be starting presently. "Will you walk with me? But you shouldn't miss your breakfast. I've had bread and milk."

"I won't go now," answered Curtin. "I'll walk up and down before the house for a while. Something happened to me last night, or I happened into something. I'd like to talk to you about it, Linden—but it won't fade before you come back. I don't indeed think it will ever fade."

There was that in Linden's remembered face, when Linden himself had gone away toward Roger Carter's, that made Curtin think, walking now before the house as they had walked the night before under the stars: "Does he know what I felt? Could he even have helped—put a shoulder to the wheel, seeing that I was grieved and uncertain?" Not so long ago he might have answered, "That's fantastic!" but he did not so answer now.

He went into the garden and walked up and down. Before seven Marget came out to him. "I saw you walking in the dawn like a man in a ballad. Could you not sleep?"

"I slept till nearly five."

They walked by the late asters and the stocks. Said Curtin: "I remember a line of Masefield's:

And again:

Miss Land, do you think that is true?"

"Yes. Surely."

"Do you think we can be reassured about the dead—all the dead—and ourselves when we die?"

"Yes, I do. Very safe, very sure."

"Well, I think so this morning."

They walked by the marigolds and larkspur. "Where do you meet the dead? In this space?" He indicated it with a wide gesture.

"No. In space that permeates this space. In added space. When and where we make space. Though I think," said Marget, "that one day the edges will have so flowed together that we shall say 'in this space.'"

"You and Richard Linden both have that assurance?"

"Yes. Many have it now." She added, "I think, perhaps, that it is more easily felt in some places than in others."

He thought, "As we put telescopes on heights."

They walked by the wall with the ivy. Her quiet, dark eyes were upon him, friendly, kindly. He thought: "No less than Linden she hoped such a night for me. Perhaps—"

A bell rang. "That is for us. Miss Darcy, too, comes down early now."

They went indoors. Anna Darcy met them in the hall and they went together into the bright dining room, to their pleasant breakfast, and Zinia waiting, with "that girl Mercy" still at heart.