PAULA AND CHARTER IN SEVERAL SETTINGS FEEL THE ENERGY OF THE GREAT GOOD THAT DRIVES THE WORLD Charter roused, after an unknown time, to the that the woman was in his arms; later, that he was sitting upon a slimy stone in a cell filled with steam. The of stone held him free from the four or five inches of almost scalding water on the floor of the . The was square, and luckily much larger than its circular orifice; so that back in the corner they were free from the discharge which had showered down through the mouth of the pit—the cause of the heated water and the released . An earthquake years before had loosened the stone-lining of the vault. With every of the earth now, under the of Pelée, the walls, still upstanding, trembled.
 
Charter was given much time to observe these matters; and to reckon with surface , such as a bleeding right hand, lacerated from the chain; a torn shoulder, and a variety of burns which he must be inconsequential, since they stung so in the hot . Then, someone with a powerful arm was knocking out three-cushion caroms in his brain-pan. This spoiled good thinking results. It is true, he did not grasp the points of the position, with the remotest trace of the sequence in which they are put down. Indeed, his mind, emerging from the depths into which the shock of had felled it, held alone with any the all-enfolding miracle that the woman was in his arms....
 
Presently, his brain began to sort the side-issues. Her head had lain, upon his shoulder during that precipitous , and her hair had fallen when he first caught her up. He remembered it blowing and covering his eyes in a manner of playful quite impossible for an outsider to conceive. Meanwhile, the blast from Pelée was upon the city; traversing the six miles from the to the Morne, faster than its own sound; six miles in little more than the time it had taken him to cross the lawn from the to the cistern. A second or two had saved them.
 
The fire had touched her hair.... Her bare arm brushed his cheek, and his whole nature suddenly crawled with the fear that she might not wake. His head dropped to her breast, and he heard her heart, light and on its way. His eyes were straining through the darkness into her face, but he could not be sure it was without burns. There was harshness in the fear that her face, so fragile, of purest line, should meet the coarse element, burning dirt. His hands were not free, but he touched her eyes, and knew that they were whole.... She sighed, stirred and a little—breath of consciousness returning. Then he heard:
 
"What is this dripping darkness?"
 
The words were slowly uttered, and the tones soft and vague, as from one dreaming, or very close to the Gates.... In a great dark room somewhere, in a past life, perhaps, he had heard such a voice from someone lying in the shadows.
 
"We are in the old cistern—you and I——"
 
"I—knew—you—would—come—for—me."
 
It was murmured as from someone very weary, very happy—as a child falling asleep after a dream, with a little nestle under the mother-wing.
 
"But how could you know?" he whispered quickly. "My heart was too full—to take a mere mountain seriously—until the last minute——"
 
"Skylarks—always—know!"
 
of rain were . Pelée roared with the after-pangs. Though cooled and by floods of black rain, the rising water in the cistern was still hot.
 
"It was always hard for me to call you Wyndam——"
 
"Harder to hear, Quentin Charter...."
 
"But are you sure you are not badly burned?" he asked for the tenth time.
 
"I don't feel badly burned.... I was watching for you from the window in my room. I didn't like the way my hair looked, and was changing it when I saw you coming—and the Black behind you. I tried to fasten it with one pin, as I ran downstairs.... It fell. It is very thick and kept the fire from me——"
 
"From us." He would have preferred his share of the red dust.
 
She shivered . "What little is burned will grow again. Red mops invariably do."
 
" ... And to think I should have found the old cistern in the night!... One night when I could not sleep, I walked out here and explored. The idea came then——"
 
"I watched you from the upper window.... The wiggled as you went away. It was the next day that the 'fraids got me. You rushed off to the mountain."
 
Often they like this beyond the borders of rational . One hears only the voices, not the words often, from Rapture's Roadway.
 
"Just as I begin to think of something Pelée erupts all over again in my skull——"
 
"I didn't know men understood headache matters.... Don't you think—don't you really think—I might be allowed to stand a little bit?"
 
"Water's still too hot," he replied .
 
The was not so dark. The circle of the orifice was sharply lit with gray.... They lost track of the hours; for moments at a time forgot physical , since they had known only mystic journeys before.... They whispered the fate of Saint Pierre—a city's soul torn from the flesh; shadows lifted from the mystery of the little wine-shop; clearly they saw how the occultist, his crippled, had used Jacques and Soronia; and Charter recalled now where he had seen the face of Paula before—the photograph in the Bellingham-cabin on the Panther.... A second cloudburst cooled and eased them, though they stood in water.... It seemed that Peter Stock should have made an effort to reach them by this time. Save that the gray was unchangeable in the roof the world, Charter could not have believed that this was all one day. The power which had the city, and with unspent violence swept the Morne, might have reached three leagues at sea!... Above all these probabilities arose their happiness.
 
"It seems that I've become a little boy," he said, "on one of those perfect Christmas mornings. Don't you remember, the greatest moment of all—coming downstairs, partly dressed, into the room They had made ready? That moment, before you actually see—just as you enter the dawn and fire-light and catch the first of the tree?... I'm afraid, Paula Linster, you have found——"
 
"A boy," she whispered. Her face was very close in the gray.... "The loved dream-boy. The boy went away to meet sternness and suffering and of misdirection—had to compromise with the world to fit at all. Ah, I have waited long, and the man has come back to me—a boy."
 
"La Montagne Pelée is ."
 
"It may be in this marvellous world, where men carry on their wars and their wooings," she went on strangely, "some pursuing their little ways of darkness, some bursting into blooms of and tenderness;—it may be that two of Earth's people, after a dreadful passage through agony and terror, have been restored to each other—as we are. It may be that in the roll of Earth's , another such film is curled away from another age and another ."
 
"Paula," he declared, after a moment, "I have found a Living Truth in this happiness—the Great Good that Drives the World! I think I shall not lose it again. Glimpses of it came to me facing the East—as I wrote and thought of you. One glimpse was so clear that I expressed it in a letter, 'I tell you there is no death, since I have heard the Skylark sing....' I lost the bright fragment, for a few days in New York—battled for the prize again both in New York and yesterday at the mountain. To-day has brought it to me—always to keep. It is this: Were you to die, I should love you and know you were near. This is love above Flesh and Death—the old mystifying Interchangeables. This happiness is the triumph over death. It is a revelation, a adoring—not a mere woman in my arms, but an issue of . A woman, but more—Love and and Life and the Great Good that Drives the World! This is the happiness I have and hold to-day: Though you died, I should know that you lived and were mine."
 
"I see it—it is the triumph over death—but, Quentin Charter—I want you still!"
 
"Don't you see, it is the strength you give me!—that girds me to say such things?"
 
So they had their flights into silence, while the eternal gray lived in their round summit of sky—until the voices of the rescuers and their own grateful answers.... The sailor was sent back to the boat for rope, while Macready cheered them with a fine and Gaelic oil.... They lifted Paula, who steadied and helped herself by the chain; then sent the down for Charter.
 
"Have you the strent', sir, to do the overhand up the chain?" Macready questioned, and added in a ghost's whisper, "with the fairest of tin thousand waitin' at the top?"
 
Charter laughed. To lift his right arm was thrashing pain, but he made it easy as he could for them; and in the gray light faced the woman.
 
She saw his lacerated hand, the , fire-blisters upon his face, the blood upon his clothing, of throat and temples, and the glowing in his eyes.... She had bound her hair, and there was much still to . No mortal hurt was visible. Behind her was the falling sea. On her right hand the smoking ruin of the Palms; to the left, Pelée and his tens of thousands ; above, the hot, leaden, hurrying clouds.... Ernst, Macready and the sailor moved away. Backs turned, they watched the of smoke and steam that rose like gray-white birds from the valley of the dead city.
 
"Ernst, lad," said Macready, "the boss and the leadin' lady are havin' an intellekchool repast in the cinter av the stage by the old well. Bear in mind you're a chorus girl and cond............