that lay in street or lane she hovered over with
caught breath and eyes of fear, nerving herself to stoop, to turn the
dead weight that settled sullenly into itself as her hands left it; to
scan the face by the light of her flaring torch. And the light showed
her as ghastly as what she looked on; black hair streaming like smoke
behind her, eyes wide with fear, pinched face glimmering pallid. No
joyful handmaiden of Love looked she, going to love's embraces, rather a
wild thing, terror-ridden, possessed wholly by the frenzy of her love.
Strange faces she looked on in her search among the living and the dead;
bearded faces, boyish faces, but never that face she sought.

To a dead man's side she flitted, like a spirit of the night; and on her
knees, holding her torch to a face with light staring eyes and open jaws
that seemed still to shriek a last despairing curse at her, she caught
her breath with a stifled scream. For the shock of thick hair, cut below
the ears, was black and coarse; and the half-naked body, from which the
tunic had been stripped, was long and lean. The torchlight cast quick
shadows upon the fearful face; and sometimes to her eyes it was the face
of her love, who had died terribly, and sometimes it was the face of a
stranger. She began to shake.

"I cannot tell--oh, God, I cannot tell!" she wailed. "Is my mind gone,
that I should not know thee? I must know--how can I go further until I
know?"

With wild eyes she looked about her. She was in the open space of the
market-place,--alone, save for the thing at her feet, and for other
things huddled here and there around her,--a silent battleground from
which the hosts had departed. The carcass of a horse lay near, and her
torch struck points of light from the metal of its trappings. A dog ran
by her on padding feet, its fangs dripping, its tail between its legs.
Eldris thrust the torch into the earth, that it might stand erect. She
knelt beside that silent screaming figure, and the light flashed from
the white bared teeth of the open mouth, and showed dark smears of blood
upon the face. She laid her hand on the shoulder, and the clammy cold of
the dead flesh sent a spasm of sickness through her.

"If it is thou I will kiss thee," she moaned. "I will lie upon thy
breast and put my mouth to that mouth of thine. And I must find
out--what if I should pass and leave thee here? God give me strength--I
must find out! Whose own mother could know him so?"

She