her
only a strange cold mask. A painful fascination held her for several
minutes, forcing her to mark how love, that had kept her young, proud,
content in its very existence, had sapped his life, and doubled his
years.

The realization bent her slender figure under a load of self-reproach
and self-mistrust. She drooped lower and lower above the sad, dead
face until she slid to the ground beside him. Heavy tearless sobs
shook her slight frame as it stretched its length beside the dead love
and the dead dream. The ideal so long treasured in her soul had lost
its reality. The present had wiped out the past as a sponge wipes off
a slate.

If she had but heeded his warning, and refrained from coming until
later, she would have escaped making a stranger of him forever. Now
the sad, aged face, the dead, strange face which she had seen but five
minutes before, had completely obscured in her memory the long-loved,
young face that had been with her all these years. The spirit whose
consoling presence she had thought to feel upholding her at this
moment made no sign. She was alone in the world, bereft of her one
supporting ideal, alone beside the dead body of one who was a stranger
alike to her sight and her emotions; alone at night in an isolation as
unexpected as it was terrible to her, and which chilled her senses as
if it had come to oppress her forever.

The shadows which she had not noticed before, the dark corners of the
tomb, the motionless gleam of the moon as it fell through the open
door, and laid silently on the floor like light stretched dead, the
low rustle of the wind as if Nature restlessly moved in her sleep,
came suddenly upon her, and brought her--fear. She held her breath as
she stilled her sobs to realize that she alone lived in this city of
the Dead. The chill of fright crept along the surface of her body,
which still vibrated with her storm of grief.

She seemed paralyzed. She dared not move.

Every sense rallied to her ears in dread.

Suddenly she heard her name breathed: "Margaret!"

It was whispered in a voice once so familiar to her ears, a voice that
used to say, "Madge."

She raised herself on her elbow.

She dared not answer.

She hardly dared breathe.

She was afraid in every sense, and yet she hungered for another sound
of that loved voice. Every hour of its banishment was regretted at
that moment. There seemed no future without it.

Every nerve listened.

At first she heard nothi