e employed in a gracious act, or how I, filled
with a purpose that has made my heart dark as hell ever since I embraced
it, could find that heart swell and that purpose sink at my first
glimpse of the face whose beauty I have sworn to devote to agony and
tears? Surely, surely Felix would have been stronger, and yet----

I went from the cars to the cemetery. Before entering the town or seeing
to my own comfort, I sought Evelyn's grave, there to renew my oath in
the place where, nineteen years ago, my father held me up, a
four-year-old child, in threat, toward John Poindexter's home. I had
succeeded in finding the old and neglected stone which marked her
resting-place, and was bending in the sunset light to examine it, when
the rustle of a woman's skirts attracted my attention, and I perceived
advancing toward me a young girl in a nimbus of rosy light which seemed
to lift her from the ground and give to her delicate figure and
strangely illumined head an ethereal aspect which her pure features and
tender bearing did not belie. In her arms she carried a huge cluster of
snow-white lilies, and when I observed that her eyes were directed not
on me, but on the grave beside which I stood, I moved aside into the
shadow of some bushes and watched her while she strewed these
flowers--emblems of innocence--over the grave I had just left.

What did it mean, and who was this young girl who honored with such
gracious memorials the grave of my long-buried sister? As she rose from
her task I could no longer restrain either my emotion or the curiosity
with which her act had inspired me. Advancing, I greeted her with all
the respect her appearance called for, and noting that her face was even
more beautiful when lifted in speech than when bent in gravity over her
flowers, I asked her, in the indifferent tone of a stranger, who was
buried in this spot, and why she, a mere girl, dropped flowers upon a
grave the mosses of whose stone proved it to have been dug long before
she was born.

Her answer caused me a shock, full as my life has lately been of
startling experiences. "I strew flowers here," said she, "because the
girl who lies buried under this stone had the same birthday as myself. I
never saw her, it's true, but she died in my father's house when she was
no older than I am to-day, and since I have become a woman and realize
what loss there is in dying young, I have made it a custom to share with
her my birthday flowers. She was a l