he did correctly were done over and over. His occasional failures
to accomplish some simple and ordinary act filled him with astonishment,
like that of a drunken man who wonders at the suspension of familiar
natural laws. He was surprised, too, that he did not weep--surprised and
a little ashamed; surely it is unkind not to weep for the dead.
"To-morrow," he said aloud, "I shall have to make the coffin and dig the
grave; and then I shall miss her, when she is no longer in sight; but
now--she is dead, of course, but it is all right--it _must_ be all
right, somehow. Things cannot be so bad as they seem."

He stood over the body in the fading light, adjusting the hair and
putting the finishing touches to the simple toilet, doing all
mechanically, with soulless care. And still through his consciousness
ran an undersense of conviction that all was right--that he should have
her again as before, and everything explained. He had had no experience
in grief; his capacity had not been enlarged by use. His heart could not
contain it all, nor his imagination rightly conceive it. He did not know
he was so hard struck; _that_ knowledge would come later, and never go.
Grief is an artist of powers as various as the instruments upon which he
plays his dirges for the dead, evoking from some the sharpest, shrillest
notes, from others the low, grave chords that throb recurrent like the
slow beating of a distant drum. Some natures it startles; some it
stupefies. To one it comes like the stroke of an arrow, stinging all the
sensibilities to a keener life; to another as the blow of a bludgeon,
which in crushing benumbs. We may conceive Murlock to have been that way
affected, for (and here we are upon surer ground than that of
conjecture) no sooner had he finished his pious work than, sinking into
a chair by the side of the table upon which the body lay, and noting how
white the profile showed in the deepening gloom, he laid his arms upon
the table's edge, and dropped his face into them, tearless yet and
unutterably weary. At that moment came in through the open window a
long, wailing sound like the cry of a lost child in the far deeps of the
darkening wood! But the man did not move. Again, and nearer than before,
sounded that unearthly cry upon his failing sense. Perhaps it was a wild
beast; perhaps it was a dream. For Murlock was asleep.

Some hours later, as it afterward appeared, this unfaithful watcher
awoke and lifting his head from his