a monument distinctly
unique in a European country. It was a huge unpolished boulder, over
which creeping green vines were growing.

On its rough surface a cross was cut, and underneath were the words:

"Yesterday This Day's Madness did prepare,
To-morrow's Silence, Triumph or Despair."

Below that I read with stupefaction,

"Margaret Dillon and child,"

and the dates

"January, 1843"
"July 25, 1882."

In spite of the doubts and fancies this put into my mind, I no sooner
stood beside the spot where the earth had claimed her, than all my old
interest in her returned. I lingered about the place, full of
romantic fancies, decorating her tomb with flowers, as I had once
decorated her triumphs, absorbed in a dreamy adoration of her memory,
and singing her praise in verse.

It was then that I learned the true story of her disappearance,
guessed at that of her death, as I did at the identity of the young
Dominican priest, who sometimes came to her grave, and who finally
told me such of the facts as I know. I can best tell the story by
picturing two nights in the life of Margaret Dillon, the two following
her last appearance on the stage.

The play had been "Much Ado."

Never had she acted with finer humor, or greater gaiety. Yet all the
evening she had felt a strange sadness.

When it was all over, and friends had trooped round to the stage to
praise her, and trooped away, laughing and happy, she felt a strange,
sad, unused reluctance to see them go.

Then she sat down to her dressing table, hurriedly removed her
make-up, and allowed herself to be stripped of her stage finery. Her
fine spirits seemed to strip off with her character. She shivered
occasionally with nervousness, or superstition, and she was strangely
silent.

All day she had, for some inexplicable reason, been thinking of her
girlhood, of what her life might have been if, at a critical moment,
she had chosen a woman's ordinary lot instead of work,--or if, at a
later day, she had yielded to, instead of resisted, a great
temptation. All day, as on many days lately, she had wondered if she
regretted it, or if, the days of her great triumph having passed,--as
pass they must,--she should regret it later if she did not yet.

It was probably because,--early in the season as it was--she was
tired, and the October night oppressed her with the heat of Indian
Summer.

Silently she had allowed herself to be undressed, and redressed in
gr