dead
darling. But sometimes her anguish would find an outlet in strange
sounds, something between a cry and a musical note,--such as none had
ever heard her utter before. These were old remembrances surging up from
her childish days,--coming through her mother from the cannibal chief,
her grandfather,--death-wails, such as they sing in the mountains of
Western Africa, when they see the fires on distant hill-sides and know
that their own wives and children are undergoing the fate of captives.

The time came when Elsie was to be laid by her mother in the small
square marked by the white stone.

It was not unwillingly that the Reverend Chauncy Fairweather had
relinquished the duty of conducting the service to the Reverend Doctor
Honeywood, in accordance with Elsie's request. He could not, by any
reasoning, reconcile his present way of thinking with a hope for the
future of his unfortunate parishioner. Any good old Roman Catholic
priest, born and bred to his faith and his business, would have found a
loop-hole into some kind of heaven for her, by virtue of his doctrine of
"invincible ignorance," or other special proviso; but a recent convert
cannot enter into the working conditions of his new creed. Beliefs must
be lived in for a good while, before they accommodate themselves to the
soul's wants, and wear loose enough to be comfortable.

The Reverend Doctor had no such scruples. Like thousands of those who
are classed nominally with the despairing believers, he had never prayed
over a departed brother or sister without feeling and expressing a
guarded hope that there was mercy in store for the poor sinner, whom
parents, wives, children, brothers and sisters could not bear to give up
to utter ruin without a word,--and would not, as he knew full well,
in virtue of that human love and sympathy which nothing can ever
extinguish. And in this poor Elsie's history he could read nothing
which the tears of the recording angel might not wash away. As the good
physician of the place knew the diseases that assailed the bodies of men
and women, so he had learned the mysteries of the sickness of the soul.

So many wished to look upon Elsie's face once more, that her father
would not deny them; nay, he was pleased that those who remembered her
living should see her in the still beauty of death. Helen and those with
her arrayed her for this farewell-view. All was ready for the sad or
curious eyes which were to look upon her. There was