ourselves in its presence. How mighty an experience
it is to wait where world overlaps the edge of world, and feel the
vastness of eternity around us! A moment ago--or was it many ages?--he
spoke. Now he is gone, leaving a strange visible image lying there to
awe us. The dead take sudden majesty. They become as gods. We think they
hear us when we speak of them, and their good becomes sacred. A dead
face has all human faults wiped from it; and that Shape, that Presence,
whose passiveness seems infinite, how it fills the house, the town, the
whole world, while it stays!

The hardest problem we have to face here is the waste of our best
things,--of hopes, of patience, of love, of days, of agonizing labor, of
lives which promise most. Rice's astonishment at the brutal waste of
himself had already passed off his countenance. The open eyes saw
nothing, but the lips were closed in sublime peace.

"And his sister," wept Angelique. "Look at Mademoiselle Zhone, also."

The dozen negroes, old and young, led by Achille, began to sob in music
one of those sweet undertone chants for the dead which no race but
theirs can master. They sung the power of the man and the tenderness of
the young sister whose soul followed her brother's, and they called from
that ark on the waters for saints and angels to come down and bless the
beds of the two. The bells intoned with them, and a sinking wind
carried a lighter ripple against the house.

"Send them out," spoke Peggy Morrison, with an imperious sweep of the
arm; and the half-breed authoritatively hurried the other slaves back to
their doorway. The submissive race understood and obeyed, anxiously
watching Peggy as she wavered in her erectness and groped with the
fingers of both hands.

"Put camphor under Ma'amselle Peggy's nose, Wachique," whispered
Achille.

Peggy found Rice's chair, and sat down; but as soon as she returned to a
consciousness of the bottle under her nose and an arm around her, she
said,--

"Go away. A Morrison never faints."

Angelique was kneeling like a nun. She felt the push of a foot.

"Stop that crying," said Peggy fiercely. "I hate to hear it. What right
have you to cry?"

"No right at all. But the whole Territory will weep over this."

"What right has the Territory in him now? The Territory will soon find
another brilliant man."

"And this poor tiny girl, Peggy, so near her death, what had she done to
deserve that it should come in this form? Are men go