cold."

The words were written larger, and staggered towards the close, as if her
hand had lost mastery over the pen.

"I can only remember Richard now a boy. A little boy and a big boy. I am
not sure now of his voice. I can only remember certain words. 'Clari,'
and 'Don Ricardo,' and his laugh. He used to be full of fun. Once we
laughed all day together tumbling in the hay. Then he had a friend, and
began to write poetry, and be proud. If I had married a young man he
would have forgiven me, but I should not have been happier. I must have
died. God never looks on me.

"It is past two o'clock. The sheep are bleating outside. It must be very
cold in the ground. Good-bye, Richard."

With his name it began and ended. Even to herself Clare was not
over-communicative. The book was slender, yet her nineteen years of
existence left half the number of pages white.

Those last words drew him irresistibly to gaze on her. There she lay, the
same impassive Clare. For a moment he wondered she had not moved--to him
she had become so different. She who had just filled his ears with
strange tidings--it was not possible to think her dead! She seemed to
have been speaking to him all through his life. His image was on that
still heart.

He dismissed the night-watchers from the room, and remained with her
alone, till the sense of death oppressed him, and then the shock sent him
to the window to look for sky and stars. Behind a low broad pine, hung
with frosty mist, he heard a bell-wether of the flock in the silent fold.
Death in life it sounded.

The mother found him praying at the foot of Clare's bed. She knelt by his
side, and they prayed, and their joint sobs shook their bodies, but
neither of them shed many tears. They held a dark unspoken secret in
common. They prayed God to forgive her.

Clare was buried in the family vault of the Todhunters. Her mother
breathed no wish to have her lying at Lobourne.

After the funeral, what they alone upon earth knew brought them together.

"Richard," she said, "the worst is over for me. I have no one to love but
you, dear. We have all been fighting against God, and this... Richard!
you will come with me, and be united to your wife, and spare my brother
what I suffer."

He answered the broken spirit: "I have killed one. She sees me as I am. I
cannot go with you to my wife, because I am not worthy to touch her hand,
and were I to go, I should do this to silence my self-contempt. Go you to