e night breeze, stole away wraith after
wraith of water mist to float and lose themselves in the sleeping
woods.

Or, once more, clearer than all else he remembered how he had watched
her, himself unseen, delaying the delight of revealing himself, one
August morning, scarcely three weeks ago, as she had come down the
road that ran past the house, again in her sun-bonnet and print dress,
with the dew shining about her on grass and hedge, and the haze of a
summer morning veiling the intensity of the blue sky above. He had
called her then gently by name, and she had turned her face to him,
alight with love and fear and sudden wonder.... He remembered even now
with a reflection of memory that was nearly an illusion the smell of
yew and garden flowers.

This, then, had been the dream; and today the awakening and the end.

That end was even more terrible than he had conceived possible on that
horrible Friday morning last week, when he had opened the telegram
from her father.

He had never before understood the sordidness of her surroundings, as
when, an hour ago, he had stood at the grave-side, his eyes wandering
from that long elm box with the silver plate and the wreath of
flowers, to the mourners on the other side--her father in his
broadcloth, his heavy, smooth face pulled in lines of grotesque
sorrow; her mother, with her crimson, tear-stained cheeks, her
elaborate black, her intolerable crape, and her jet-hung mantle. Even
these people had been seen by him up to then through a haze of love;
he had thought them simple honest folk, creatures of the soil, yet
wholesome, natural, and sturdy. And now that the jewel was lost the
setting was worse than empty. There in the elm box lay the remnants of
the shattered gem.... He had seen her in her bed on the Sunday, her
fallen face, her sunken eyes, all framed in the detestable whiteness
of linen and waxen flowers, yet as pathetic and as appealing as ever,
and as necessary to his life. It was then that the supreme fact had
first penetrated to his consciousness, that he had lost her--the fact
which, driven home by the funeral scene this morning, the rustling
crowd come to see the young Squire, the elm box, the heap of
flowers--had now flung him down on this couch, crushed, broken, and
hopeless, like young ivy after a thunderstorm.

His moods alternated with the rapidity of flying clouds. At one
instant he was furious with pain, at the next broken and lax from the
same cause.