e her, she rushed out of this charnel house,
and impatiently called to the others to join her in the church.

With an effort Lady Mabel stifled her contagious terror, and,
advancing further into the gloomy repository, inspected it on all
sides. There was little room left on the walls for more memorials of
mortality. Having in silence sated her curiosity and her sense of the
horrible, feeling all the while a strange reluctance to break the
deathlike stillness of the place by uttering a word, she at length
rejoined Mrs. Shortridge. After taking another look into this
apartment of death, her eye rested on the inscription over the arch.
L'Isle translated it:

Our bones, which here are resting
Are expecting yours.

"God forbid that mine should find so gloomy a resting place,"
exclaimed Mrs. Shortridge, with a shudder.

"It is a weakness," said Lady Mabel; "yet we must shrink from this
promiscuous mingling of our ashes, and are even choice in the
selection of our last resting place. We hope even in death to rejoin
our kindred dust in the ancestral vault, or at least to repose under
some sunny spot, in the churchyard hallowed to us in life. Is not this
your feeling?" she said, appealing to L'Isle.

L'Isle looked grave. "It is a natural feeling clinging to our mortal
nature, and doubtless has its use. But I must not indulge it. The
soldier is even less at liberty than other men to choose his own
grave. The fosse of a beleaguered fortress, a shallow trench in a
well-fought field, the ravine of a disputed mountain pass, the strand
of some river to be crossed in the face of the enemy--all these have
furnished, and will furnish graves for those who fall, and have the
luck to find burial; the wolf and the vulture provide for the rest. We
have a wide graveyard," he added, more cheerfully, "stretching from
hence to the Pyrenees, and, perchance, beyond them. It embraces many a
lovely and romantic spot, only the choice of our last resting place is
not left to ourselves."

Lady Mabel shuddered at this gloomy picture, and his foreboding
tone. She knew how many of her countrymen had fallen, and must fall,
in this bloody war. Yet, somehow or other, she had always thought of
L'Isle as one who was to live, and not to die prematurely, cut off in
youth, health, the pride of manhood, his hopes, powers, aspirations,
just in their bloom. She looked at him with deep, painful interest, as
if to read his fortune in his face. What special