sacred in the memory. In the falling greyness of the evening he watched
her figure winding through the morass, saw it turn a last time and wave
a hand, and then pass through the Slap; and it seemed to him as if
something went along with her out of the deepest of his heart. And
something surely had come, and come to dwell there. He had retained
from childhood a picture, now half obliterated by the passage of time
and the multitude of fresh impressions, of his mother telling him, with
the fluttered earnestness of her voice, and often with dropping tears,
the tale of the "Praying Weaver," on the very scene of his brief tragedy
and long repose. And now there was a companion piece; and he beheld,
and he should behold for ever, Christina perched on the same tomb, in
the grey colours of the evening, gracious, dainty, perfect as a flower,
and she also singing-


"Of old, unhappy far off things,
And battles long ago,"


of their common ancestors now dead, of their rude wars composed, their
weapons buried with them, and of these strange changelings, their
descendants, who lingered a little in their places, and would soon be
gone also, and perhaps sung of by others at the gloaming hour. By one
of the unconscious arts of tenderness the two women were enshrined
together in his memory. Tears, in that hour of sensibility, came into
his eyes indifferently at the thought of either; and the girl, from
being something merely bright and shapely, was caught up into the zone
of things serious as life and death and his dead mother. So that in all
ways and on either side, Fate played his game artfully with this poor
pair of children. The generations were prepared, the pangs were made