ed upon him like a cloak,
grateful, comforting, dispelling the chill that lurked in the damp mould
of plaster and crumbling adobe.

But now he found his way across the garden on the other side of the
fountain, where, ranged against the eastern wall, were nine graves.
Here Angele was buried, in the smallest grave of them all, marked by the
little headstone, with its two dates, only sixteen years apart. To this
spot, at last, he had returned, after the years spent in the desert, the
wilderness--after all the wanderings of the Long Trail. Here, if ever,
he must have a sense of her nearness. Close at hand, a short four feet
under that mound of grass, was the form he had so often held in the
embrace of his arms; the face, the very face he had kissed, that face
with the hair of gold making three-cornered the round white forehead,
the violet-blue eyes, heavy-lidded, with their strange oriental slant
upward toward the temples; the sweet full lips, almost Egyptian in their
fulness--all that strange, perplexing, wonderful beauty, so troublous,
so enchanting, so out of all accepted standards.

He bent down, dropping upon one knee, a hand upon the headstone, and
read again the inscription. Then instinctively his hand left the stone
and rested upon the low mound of turf, touching it with the softness of
a caress; and then, before he was aware of it, he was stretched at full
length upon the earth, beside the grave, his arms about the low mound,
his lips pressed against the grass with which it was covered. The
pent-up grief of nearly twenty years rose again within his heart, and
overflowed, irresistible, violent, passionate. There was no one to
see, no one to hear. Vanamee had no thought of restraint. He no longer
wrestled with his pain--strove against it. There was even a sense of
relief in permitting himself to be overcome. But the reaction from this
outburst was equally violent. His revolt against the inevitable, his
protest against the grave, shook him from head to foot, goaded him
beyond all bounds of reason, hounded him on and into the domain of
hysteria, dementia. Vanamee was no longer master of himself--no longer
knew what he was doing.

At first, he had been content with merely a wild, unreasoned cry to
Heaven that Angele should be restored to him, but the vast egotism that
seems to run through all forms of disordered intelligence gave his
fancy another turn. He forgot God. He no longer reckoned with Heaven. He
arrogated t