decide
whether he ought to prepare her for the state the boy was in. Twice he
screwed himself up to take the plunge, but her face--puzzled, as though
wondering at her lover's neglect of her--stopped him. Better say
nothing!

Just as they reached the prison she put her hand on his arm:

"Look, Dad!"

And Felix read on the corner of the prison lane those words: 'Love's
Walk'!

Derek was waiting at the door. After some difficulty they were admitted
and taken down the corridor where the prisoner on his knees had stared up
at Nedda, past the courtyard where those others had been pacing out their
living hieroglyphic, up steps to the hospital. Here, in a white-washed
room on a narrow bed, the body of the big laborer lay, wrapped in a
sheet.

"We bury him Friday, poor chap! Fine big man, too!" And at the warder's
words a shudder passed through Felix. The frozen tranquillity of that
body!

As the carved beauty of great buildings, so is the graven beauty of
death, the unimaginable wonder of the abandoned thing lying so quiet,
marvelling at its resemblance to what once lived! How strange this
thing, still stamped by all that it had felt, wanted, loved, and hated,
by all its dumb, hard, commonplace existence! This thing with the calm,
pathetic look of one who asks of his own fled spirit: Why have you
abandoned me?

Death! What more wonderful than a dead body--that still perfect work of
life, for which life has no longer use! What more mysterious than this
sight of what still is, yet is not!

Below the linen swathing the injured temples, those eyes were closed
through which such yearning had looked forth. From that face, where the
hair had grown faster than if it had been alive, death's majesty had
planed away the aspect of brutality, removed the yearning, covering all
with wistful acquiescence. Was his departed soul coherent? Where was
it? Did it hover in this room, visible still to the boy? Did it stand
there beside what was left of Tryst the laborer, that humblest of all
creatures who dared to make revolt--serf, descendant of serfs, who, since
the beginning, had hewn wood, drawn water, and done the will of others?
Or was it winged, and calling in space to the souls of the oppressed?

This body would go back to the earth that it had tended, the wild grass
would grow over it, the seasons spend wind and rain forever above it.
But that which had held this together--the inarticulate, lowly spirit,
hardly a