in the new cemetery. These pilgrimages he usually made at night--his
grief was too sacred a thing to be flaunted in broad daylight. Many a
night during the spring and summer found him slipping down the stair,
when the house was asleep, and taking his way through the silent city
of Slumber to that even more silent city of Death.

Oh, that those that lay there not much more still than they who lay
asleep in their beds in that other city, might arise like them with the
morrow's sun!

Often, as he walked along, drinking in the perfumed night air that he
loved--the night breeze gratefully lifting the ringlets from his fevered
brow--often he thought of that first summer's night when with the sweet
words of Shelley's serenade: "I arise from dreams of thee," singing
themselves in his heart, he had gone with light feet to worship beneath
her window.

Ah, the world was young then, for sweet hope was alive!

The iron gates of the cemetery were locked, but the wall was not very
high. To scale it but added zest to his adventure. He would be a knight
unfit for his vigil if he were to let himself be so easily balked.

Within the wall the odors of flowers were even heavier, more
oppressively sweet than without, and the silence surpassed the silence
of the outer city even as the stillness of the sleepers here surpassed
the stillness of those yonder.

He listened and listened to the silence. Surely if she should speak,
even from down under the ground he could hear her across this silence
which was as a void--a black and terrible void.

His first pilgrimages were by moonlight, but when the moonless nights
came he continued his vigils. He would have known the way by that time
with his eyes shut.

Sometimes he was afraid--horribly afraid. He seemed, in the shadows, to
descry weird phantom-shapes, moving stealthily; in the silence to hear
ghostly whispers; sometimes he fancied he heard _the silence itself_!
But in the very fear that clutched his throat there was a fascination--a
lure--that made it impossible to turn back.

His sorrow was exquisite; his terror was exquisite; his loneliness was
oh, how exquisite! Yet in courting them all, here in the dead of night,
prone on her grave, he found the only balm he knew--the only sympathy;
for to his fancy the dark and the quiet had always seemed sentient
things and he felt that they gave him a sympathy he did not--could not
ask of people.

* * * * *

A