herself. But the firm step, the fearless, hopeful face with which she
had approached the coffin of her dead lover were very different from
the blind manner in which she stumbled back to his bier, and the hand
which a second time raised the lantern trembled so that its wavering
light shed an added weirdness on the still face, so strange to her
eyes, and stranger still to her heart.

He had been a young man when they parted. To her he had remained
young. Now the hair about the brows was thin and white, the drooping
mustache that entirely concealed the mouth was grizzled; lines
furrowed the forehead, outlined the sunken eyes, and gave an added
thinness to the nostrils. She bent once more over the face, to her
only a strange cold mask. A painful fascination held her for several
minutes, forcing her to mark how love, that had kept her young, proud,
content in its very existence, had sapped his life, and doubled his
years.

The realization bent her slender figure under a load of self-reproach
and self-mistrust. She drooped lower and lower above the sad, dead
face until she slid to the ground beside him. Heavy tearless sobs
shook her slight frame as it stretched its length beside the dead love
and the dead dream. The ideal so long treasured in her soul had lost
its reality. The present had wiped out the past as a sponge wipes off
a slate.

If she had but heeded his warning, and refrained from coming until
later, she would have escaped making a stranger of him forever. Now
the sad, aged face, the dead, strange face which she had seen but five
minutes before, had completely obscured in her memory the long-loved,
young face that had been with her all these years. The spirit whose