re left him shorn
of his strength, and when his arms fell they were around her. He held
her for a moment as a drowning man holds to that which is flung out to
him to save his life; then he pushed her from him. "Let me get out of
this. I must get out of the room."

"You'll not do anything to yourself? Ah, tell me that."

He snatched up his hat and fled from her without reply.

He wandered like a madman all night long. Whither he did not know or
care. He was walking down his anguish, burying his new grief deep, deep.
His nails clenched into his palms, the tears ran over his face. One by
one as the pictures of his mother came to him, imperious, graceful,
enchanting, one by one he blessed them, worshipped before them until the
curtain fell at the end--he could not picture that. Had she called for
him in vain? Had she watched the open door to see him enter? In God's
name why hadn't they sent for him? "Suddenly of heart disease ..." the
morning of this very day--this very day. And on he tramped,
unconsciously going in the direction he had taken that morning, and at a
late hour found himself without the gates of the cemetery where he and
Molly Shannon had spent the late afternoon. The iron gates were closed;
within stretched the shining rows of the houses and palaces of the dead,
and on their snowy portals and their marble doors fell the first tender
glimmer of the day. Holding the gate between his convulsive hands,
staring in as though he begged an entrance as a lodger, Fairfax saw rise
before him the angel with the benign uplifting hand, and the lettering,
large and clear, seemed written that day for him as much as for any
man--

"_Why seek ye the living among the dead?_"

He raised his eyes to the angel face on whose brow and lips the light of
his visions had gathered for him that morning; and as he looked the
angelic figure brightened in the dawn; and after a few moments in which
he remained blotted against the rails like an aspirant at Heaven's gate,
he turned and more quietly took his way home.

CHAPTER XV

He did not go South. There was nothing for him to go for. The idea of
his home uninhabited by her made him a coward. Emmeline sent him her
thimble, her lace collar, her wedding ring and a lock of her hair,
shining still and without a touch of grey. The packet, wrapped up in
soft paper and folded by jasmine leaves and buds, whose withered petals
were like a faded dress, Fairfax put away in his trunk and