When strength and reason came back to him he was like a new being.
Happiness gave wings to his feet and he walked on air. A divine song
seemed to be singing in his ears. Mechanically, he went through the
regular routine of school, with no difference that others could see. To
himself, heart and soul--detached and divorced from his body--seemed
soaring in a new and beautiful world in which lessons and teachers had
no place, no part. Whenever it was possible for him to do so unobserved,
he would snatch the rose from his bosom and kiss and caress it. He only
lived to see Sunday come round.

But on the next Sunday and the next she was absent from her accustomed
place. Such a thing had not happened before since he had first seen her.
He was filled with the first real anxiety he had ever known. Here was a
mystery in which there was no charm!

The Wednesday after the second Sunday upon which he had missed her was a
day dropped out of heaven. The mild, early summer air that floated
through the open windows into the gloomy, oak-ceiled schoolroom, was
ambrosial with the breathings of flowers. Young Edgar could not fix his
thoughts upon the page before him. The out-of-door world was calling to
him. He found himself listening to the birds in the trees outside and
gazing through the narrow, pointed windows at the waving branches.

Suddenly his heart stopped. The deep, sweet, hollow, ghostlike voice of
the bell in the steeple, tolling for a funeral, was borne to his ears.
In a moment his fevered imagination associated the tolling with the
absence of his divinity from her pew, and in spite of passionately
assuring himself that it could not be, and recalling how lovely and full
of health she had been when he saw her through the gate, he was