her hair
over what had been her face.

Over in a sheltered spot behind the vault clambered a huge,
overgrown, briery rose, and by some sweet impatience of nature one
shoot had budded before its time. I broke off the small, pale roses
and placed them in her grasp. But Mr. Jelnik took from his breast a
pearl and silver crucifix, and this, reverently, he laid upon hers.

"It was my father's grandmother's. She held it when she was dying.
She was an old saint. It would please her to know that her crucifix
should stay, one holy thing, with Jessamine Hynds."

"'_Verily, the gate of repentance is not nor shall be shut upon
God's creatures until the sun shall rise in the west_,'" The Jinnee
quoted his Prophet And he broke off two of his _saphies_, each with
a holy verse written upon it, and dropped them upon her out of pure
charity.

Daoud, who was intelligent and orthodox where Achmet was emotional
and tender, was evidently not altogether sure of the wisdom of this
proceeding; but he was not too orthodox to stand up arrow-straight,
face the East, and pray for her.

So we wrapped her, brown silk dress and yellowed laces, and long
black hair, in the strip of canvas, and gave her to the earth. The
last thing we saw, thank God! before the blanket fell over her for
the last time, was the silver crucifix shining out of the roses in
her hands.

Daoud and Achmet, their spades over their shoulders, left the
cemetery, the latter the strangest, quaintest, most outlandish
figure ever seen on a Carolina road. Mr. Jelnik and I, with Boris
close beside us, walked more slowly.

"Shall you go on with the search?" I ventured presently.

"But where shall I begin now?" he wondered. "I have searched
everything and every place searchable."

"If Shooba hid them anywhere outside of that room, it must have been
in some place that Jessamine herself knew and could get at if she
wished; some particular place where nobody would dream of looking
for them. Women always choose hiding-places like that, and the
notion would suit Shooba's grim humor," I said.

"They who knew every nook and cranny of the house searched it pretty
thoroughly at the time," he reminded me. "I have fine-combed it
myself."

"I am so sorry! I wanted you to find them. But the fact that you
didn't surely couldn't make very much difference to you. One's
happiness doesn't depend upon anything so problematical."

He hesitated. "Aside from their value, which is by no means