upon the bed beside her, and drew her into my arms.

"Lucia! my Lucia!" The sweet face almost seemed to smile as I drew the
head to me, and a soft curl of hair fell upon my arm as I pushed it
round her neck and pressed her breast to mine. It came softly and
unresistingly, just so much as my arm pressed it, with terrible
compliance. The throat chilled through my arm to the bone, numbed it.

I laid my other hand upon her neck, pushed it lower till it rested
above her heart, and enclosed one breast, nerveless, pulseless, and
cold, colder than any snow. Slowly it chilled through my fingers. I
smoothed one passive arm--how cold. Then my hand sought her waist, and
my arm leant upon her hip--as once in Paris--and here the coldness held
and froze me.

Through her silk skirt it penetrated; the damp, eternal coldness
pierced through my quivering, living arm; it seemed dividing my veins
like steel.

It was a dead woman that I clasped: a corpse. I strained my eyes down
upon her face, that seemed but asleep.

"Lucia?"

And the word was one frenzied, senseless question; and the sweet mouth
seemed to smile back, in its last eternal smile, my answer,--

"Yes, I am Lucia, and you possess me now."

Like a torrent dammed up for a moment, the flood of insensate, impotent
desire flowed again, raging through all my veins, and engulfed me; my
burning arms interlaced her, my weight pressed upon her, my trembling
lips, full of torturing flame, sought hers, met, closed upon them in a
frenzy of vain, fruitless longing and stayed--frozen there.

When I was hardly well from weeks of raving illness that followed, but
yet well enough to walk and go about like a rational being, I went to
the cemetery to see all that now remained to me beyond my own fearful
memory. Dick was beside me. He had insisted on coming with me, and,
when we reached the grave, he stood beside me at its edge, as he had
stood beside me at the altar.

A huge slab of white marble lay horizontal upon the narrow, single
grave. Fools! They should have made it a double one. A heavy iron
chain, swinging great balls, studded with spikes, was linked from post
to post round the tomb. At its head rose a cross, extending its arms
against a background of cypresses.

I looked at it all with dry and savage eyes. The illimitable regret,
the boundless, hopeless remorse for the irrevocable that has been
shaped by our own heedless hands, the unspeakable yearning for that,
once more,