l of
mackerel were reflected; a fishing-boat, far out in the Channel, being
momentarily discernible under the coffin also.

The procession wandered round to a particular corner, and halted, and
paused there a long while in the wind, the sea behind them, the surplice
of the priest still blowing. Jocelyn stood with his hat off: he was
present, though he was a quarter of a mile off; and he seemed to hear
the words that were being said, though nothing but the wind was audible.

He instinctively knew that it was none other than Avice whom he was
seeing interred; HIS Avice, as he now began presumptuously to call
her. Presently the little group withdrew from before the sea-shine, and
disappeared.

He felt himself unable to go further in that direction, and turning
aside went aimlessly across the open land, visiting the various spots
that he had formerly visited with her. But, as if tethered to the
churchyard by a cord, he was still conscious of being at the end of
a radius whose pivot was the grave of Avice Caro; and as the dusk
thickened he closed upon his centre and entered the churchyard gate.

Not a soul was now within the precincts. The grave, newly shaped, was
easily discoverable behind the church, and when the same young moon
arose which he had observed the previous evening from his window
in London he could see the yet fresh foot-marks of the mourners and
bearers. The breeze had fallen to a calm with the setting of the sun:
the lighthouse had opened its glaring eye, and, disinclined to leave
a spot sublimed both by early association and present regret, he moved
back to the church-wall, warm from the afternoon sun, and sat down upon
a window-sill facing the grave.

2. IV. SHE THREATENS TO RESUME CORPOREAL SUBSTANCE

The lispings of the sea beneath the cliffs were all the sounds that
reached him, for the quarries were silent now. How long he sat here
lonely and thinking he did not know. Neither did he know, though he felt
drowsy, whether inexpectant sadness--that gentle soporific--lulled him
into a short sleep, so that he lost count of time and consciousness of
incident. But during some minute or minutes he seemed to see Avice Caro
herself, bending over and then withdrawing from her grave in the light
of the moon.

She seemed not a year older, not a digit less slender, not a line more
angular than when he had parted from her twenty years earlier, in the
lane hard by. A renascent reasoning on the impossibili