gh as still and as white as the
snow outside. Now and again she coughed--a weak, ghostly sort of cough.
Over her wasted body, in addition to the thin bed-clothing, lay her
husband's old military cape. Against her breast nestled Catalina,
purring contentedly while she kept the heart of her mistress warm a
little longer. Near the foot of her bed the Mother sat--a more perfect
picture than ever of the Mater Dolorosa--chafing the tiny cold feet; at
the head her husband bent over her and chafed her hands. About the room,
but not near enough to intrude upon the sacred grief of the stricken
mother and husband, sat several of the good women whose friendship had
been the mainstay of the three. Through the window, gaining brilliance
from the ice-laden branches outside, fell the rays of the setting sun,
glorifying the room and the bed. Scarce a word was spoken, but upon the
request of the dying girl for music one of the visitors began to sing in
low, tremulous tones, the beautiful old hymn, "Jerusalem the Golden." To
the man, bowed beneath his woe as it had been a physical weight, the
words came as a knell, and a blacker despair than ever settled upon his
wild eyes and haggard face. To his dying wife they were a promise--the
smile upon her lip and the look of wonder in her eyes showed that she
was already beholding the glories of which the old hymn told.

And so wandered her spirit out of the cold and the want and the gloom
that had darkened and chilled the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, into
the regions of "bliss beyond compare."

But her husband, left behind, was as the man in his own story,
"Silence," who sat upon a rock--the gray and ghastly rock of
"Desolation." "With his brow lofty with thought and his eyes wild with
care and the fables of sorrow and weariness and disgust with mankind
written in furrows upon his cheek," he sat upon the lonely grey rock and
leaned his head upon his hand and looked out upon the desolation. She
was no more--no more!--the maiden who lived with no other thought than
to love and be loved by him;--his wife--in all the storm and stress of
his troubled life his true heartsease!

Out of the desolation he perceived a thing that was formless, that was
invisible--but that was appalling--_silence_. Silence that made him
shrink and quake--he that had loved, had longed for silence! Silence
would crush him now. And solitude!--how often he had craved it! He had
solitude a plenty now.

Like a hunted ani