d shadows, stately and slow and solemn in its pomp
of death. There was a bier, draped with a pall of sable velvet, and
drawn by four white horses, pacing slow. Slaves and clients went on foot
before and behind it; and beside it there walked a man, tall and of
lordly bearing. His hand rested on the bier's edge; his face, bowed upon
his breast, was scored with sorrow. There was dust upon the richness of
his mourning cloak; and dust also on the plumed trappings of the horses,
and the garments and the sandals of the slaves. This pilgrimage of love
and sorrow had been no easy one, nor short. Nicanor, peering through the
brambles at the sombre train, read the story in the man's face, where
tragedy sat frozen. At once his mind's eyes saw, beneath the embroidered
pall, a fair dead face, great eyes closed, and lashes drooping on a
marble cheek, two hands folded on a pulseless breast. In a heart-beat it
was as though a veil had lifted, and he probed the depths of one phase
of the world's tragedy; through one man's sorrow he looked into the
sorrows of all men. By his own pain he felt himself made kin to all
those thousands of the earth who knew pain also. The feeling lasted but
a moment, and was gone, leaving him with hushed breath and shining eyes.

"Here have I found another chord of life to play on," he said softly.
"And when it is touched there is no human heart but must answer. So thou
also hast lost her, O friend! And yet, perhaps, after all, thou art
happier than I. There are things worse than death, as I have found. At
least ... she is all thine!"

When the turn of the afternoon had come, and while he lay watching gnats
dancing in a shaft of golden light that fell athwart the trees, his ears
caught voices from the road, and the click of a horse's feet against a
stone. A woman laughed; and again he parted the brambles and looked out.
The road was splashed with sunshine and shadowed by the trees which
arched above it and hid the sky. Down it, with faces turned from
Thorney, two came toward him,--a girl, sitting sideways on a great bay
horse, leaning to the man who walked beside it. She was fair, with long
hair lying in a golden sheen upon her crimson mantle. She rode steadying
herself to the horse's stride with a hand upon the man's shoulder. He,
tall, fair also of hair and skin, with blue eyes laughing under flaxen
brows, in a brown leathern jacket and brazen cap which caught the sun in
small sliding gleams of light, led th