along the verge
of the common, marble fingers pointed up to the heaven of blue that
bent above "God's Acre"; while now and then, bulbous towers, and
glittering steeple vanes, caught the sunshine on their polished crests.
Beyond the whole, and bounding the valley filled with a billowy sea of
bluish-green pine tops, rose a wooded eminence, wearing still its
Persian robe of autumn foliage, and on its brow the colonnade and
chimneys of "Elm Bluff" blotted the southern sky, like a threatening
phantom.

To-day forest, stream, earth and sky, appeared branded with one fatal
word, as if the world's wide page held only "Ricordo! Ricordo!"

Beryl shut her eyes and groaned; but the scene merely shifted to a dell
under the shadow of Carrara hills, where olives set "Ricordo" among
their silver leaves; and lemons painted "Ricordo" in their pale gold;
and scarlet pomegranates and nodding violets, burning anemones and
tender green of trailing maiden-hair ferns all blazoned "Ricordo."

The fierce tide of wrath, that indignation and her keen sense of
outraged innocence had poured like molten lead through her throbbing
arteries, was oozing sluggishly, congealing under the awful spell of
that one word "Ricordo." Hitherto, the shame of the suspicion, the
degradation of the imprisonment had caught and empaled her thoughts;
but by degrees, these became dwarfed by the growing shadow of a
possibly ignominious death, which spread its sable pinions along the
rosy dawn of her womanhood, and devoured the glorious sun of her high
hopes. The freezing gloom was creeping nearer, and to-day she could
expect no succor, save by one avenue.

Islam believes that only the cimeter edge of Al Sirat divides Paradise
from perdition. Beryl realized that in her peril, she trod an equally
narrow snare, over yawning ruin, holding by a single thread of hope
that handkerchief. Weak natures shiver and procrastinate, shunning
confirmation of their dread; but to this woman had come a frantic
longing to see, to grasp, to embrace the worst. She was in a death
grapple with appalling fate, and that handkerchief would decide the
issue.

Physical exhaustion was following close upon the mental agony that had
stretched her on the rack, for so many days and nights. To sit still
was impossible, yet in her wandering up and down the narrow room, she
reeled, and sometimes staggered against the wall, dizzy from weakness,
to which she would not succumb.

Human help was no more