Chapter 21

"AND THEY LAID HIM TO HIS REST"

I remember next being in my own bedroom. I was taking off the cavalier's dress, and I felt like a traveller who had returned from some far and beautiful land. I never wept, nor even sighed. And I remember the rest of that strange and ghostly day, the silence of the house, and the room beyond the pretty corridor that held a thing stranger than anything on earth or in the sea. It rained slightly towards dusk. I was looking out of a window on to the garden, later—it may have been midnight for aught I know, I came down the painted corridor, and entered the bedroom. A lamp was burning, and on the bed lay something small and straight, covered with a sheet. I drew away the sheet, and saw the face I had known so well; just the same it looked, only smaller and more helpless, and the smile had faded away into a vague, beseeching look.

Then I remember days that passed, and one day when Wilder said to me, "You will not come?" "Where?" I asked. "To the graveyard."

I was in the library when he spoke. I shook my head.

He left the room; and a little later I heard heavy footsteps, and the tolling of a bell in the distance. I counted, one, two, three—sixteen, then the bell ceased.