Between Snow and Fire — page 218: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

7 ee 2 ae eee ibe be a be 8) Pa De Vere Ga ee 210 ‘TWEEN SNO w AND FIRE. .2* down in a flaming rainbow of rare tints, each more subtle | than the other, each more gorgeous, and withal more deli- 4 cate than the last. r The enchantment of the hour was upon Eanswyth to the 7 full—the loneliness, the sense of absolute solitude, cut off ( from the outer world, alone with her dead. Wandering down to the gate of the now tenaniless ostrich camp she 1s going over the incidents of that last day—that first and that last day, for 1t was that upon which they had discovered to each other their great and all-absorbing love. ‘“ The last day ® we shall have together,” he had said—and it was so. She . can vividly conjure up his presence at her side now. Every word he said, every careless gesture even, comes back to her now. Here was the gate where they had stood feeding the great birds, idly chatting about nothing in particular, and yet how full were both their hearts even then. And that long sweet embrace so startlingly inter- rupted! Ah! what a day that had been! One day out of a whole life-time. Standing here on this doubly hallowed spot, it seems to her that an eternity of unutterable wretchedness wou!d not be too great a price to pay for just that one day over again. But he is gone. Whether their love had been the most sacred that ever blessed the lot of mortal here below, or the unhallowed, inexorably forbidden thing it really is, matters nothing now. Death has decided, and from his arbitration there is no appeal. She throws herself upon the sward: there in the shade of the mimosa trees where they had sat together. All Nature is calm and at peace, and, with the withdrawal of man, the wild creatures of the earth seem to have reclaimed their own. : A little duiker buck steps daintly along beneath the thorn fence of the ostrich camp, and the grating, metallic cackle 4 of the wild guinea-fowl is followed by the appearance of quite a large covey of those fine game birds, pecking away, though ever with an air of confirmed distrust, within two score yards of the pale, silent mourner, seated there. The c half-whistling, half-twanging note of the yellow thrush a mingles with the melodious call of a pair of blue cranes . stalking along in the grass, and above the drowsy, meas- ured hum of bees storing sweetness from the flowering a" aloes, there arises the heavier boom of some great scarabeus winging his way in blundering, aimless fashion athwart the balmy and sensuous evening air. . j Eomilcbooks com