Maid Marion approached at her call. She wrapped him in her cloak,
and--a young wife of those times alone would do it--put him in the
saddle before her: the good mare Maid Marion alone knows the rest. In
the early gray dawn, from one highway there rode into the town the
baffled pursuers, from the other the grandmother's grandmother,
clasping the corpse of her husband with arms as stiff as his own;
loving him, so the grandmother used to say, with a love which, if ever
love could do so, would have effected a resurrection.




THE OLD LADY'S RESTORATION


The news came out in the papers that the old lady had been restored
to her fortune. She had been deprived of it so long ago that the real
manner of her dispossession had become lost, or at least hidden under
the many versions that had been invented to replace lapses of memory,
or to remedy the unpicturesqueness of the original truth. The face of
truth, like the face of many a good woman, is liable to the accident
of ugliness, and the desire to embellish one as well as the other
need not necessarily proceed from anything more harmful than an
overweighted love of the beautiful.

If the old lady had not been restored to her fortune, her _personalia_
would have remained in the oblivion which, as one might say, had
accumulated upon everything belonging to her. But after that newspaper
paragraph, there was such a flowering of memory around her name as
would have done credit to a whole cemetery on All Saints. It took