ird brought down by a
shot. It was the Republic falling asleep with Miette under the red flag.
Ah, what wretchedness! They were both dead, both had bleeding wounds in
their breasts. And it was they--the corpses of his two loves--that now
barred his path of life. He had nothing left him and might well die
himself. These were the thoughts that had made him so gentle, so
listless, so childlike all the way from Sainte-Roure. The soldiers
might have struck him, he would not have felt it. His spirit no longer
inhabited his body. It was far away, prostrate beside the loved ones who
were dead under the trees amidst the pungent smoke of the gunpowder.

But the one-eyed man was growing impatient; giving a push to Mourgue,
who was lagging behind, he growled: "Get along, do; I don't want to be
here all night."

Silvere stumbled. He looked at his feet. A fragment of a skull lay
whitening in the grass. He thought he heard a murmur of voices filling
the pathway. The dead were calling him, those long departed ones, whose
warm breath had so strangely perturbed him and his sweetheart during
the sultry July evenings. He recognised their low whispers. They were
rejoicing, they were telling him to come, and promising to restore
Miette to him beneath the earth, in some retreat which would prove
still more sequestered than this old trysting-place. The cemetery, whose
oppressive odours and dark vegetation had breathed eager desire into the
children's hearts, while alluringly spreading out its couches of rank
grass, without succeeding however in throwing them into one another's
arms, now longed to imbibe Silvere's warm blood. For two summers past it
had been expecting the young lovers.

"Is it here?" asked the one-eyed man.

Silvere looked in front of him. He had reached the end of the path. His
eyes fell on the tombstone, and he started. Miette was right, that stone
was for her. _"Here lieth . . . Marie . . . died . . . "_ She was
dead, that slab had fallen over her. His strength failing him, he leant
against the frozen stone. How warm it had been when they sat in that
nook, chatting for many a long evening! She had always come that way,
and the pressure of her foot, as she alighted from the wall, had worn
away the stone's surface in one corner. The mark seemed instinct with
something of her lissom figure. And to Silvere it appeared as if some
fatalism attached to all these objects--as if the stone were there
precisely in order that he mig