on the face of the sarcophagus, and once more, it was like the voice
that was hushed in my ears.

"I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye
While the dim sheeted ghosts go by."

"Amen," I said, with all my heart, to the words he had carved above
her, for what, after the fever of such a life, could be so welcome to
her as dreamless, eternal silence, in which there would be no more
passion, no more struggling, no more love?

And, if I wished with all my soul, that the great surprise of death
might, for her, have been peace and silence, did I not bar myself as
well as him from the hope of Heaven?

How long I stood there, with hungry eyes devouring the marble effigy
of her I so loved--now tortured by its fidelity, now punished by its
coldness--I never knew.

Sometimes I noticed the changing of the light, the shifting of the
shadows, as the sun swung steadily upward, but it was a subconscious
observation which did not recall me to myself and the present.

Back, back turned my thoughts to the past.

Here, where she now lay in her gorgeous tomb, had then stood an arbor,
and below had roared the rushing river.

It was the night of our wedding.