ed,--asleep, not dead. But Kenelm saw it not; he noticed only the
general desolation of the spot.

"Natural enough," thought he. "She has outgrown all such pretty
silliness. A wife cannot remain a child. Still, if she had belonged to
me--" The thought choked even his inward, unspoken utterance. He turned
away, paused a moment under the leafless boughs of the great willow
still dipping into the brook, and then with impatient steps strode back
towards the garden gate.

"No,--no,--no. I cannot now enter that house and ask for Mrs. Melville.
Trial enough for one night to stand on the old ground. I will return to
the town. I will call at Jessie's, and there I can learn if she indeed
be happy."

So he went on by the path along the brook-side, the night momently
colder and colder, and momently clearer and clearer, while the moon
noiselessly glided into loftier heights. Wrapped in his abstracted
thoughts, when he came to the spot in which the path split in twain,
he did not take that which led more directly to the town. His steps,
naturally enough following the train of his thoughts, led him along
the path with which the object of his thoughts was associated. He found
himself on the burial-ground, and in front of the old ruined tomb with
the effaced inscription.

"Ah! child! child!" he murmured almost audibly, "what depths of woman
tenderness lay concealed in thee! In what loving sympathy with the
past--sympathy only vouchsafed to the tenderest women and the highest
poets--didst thou lay thy flowers on the tomb, to which thou didst give
a poet's history interpreted by a woman's heart, little dreaming that
beneath the stone slept a hero of thine own fallen race."

He passed beneath the shadow of the yews, whose leaves no winter wind
can strew, and paused at the ruined tomb,--no flower now on its stone,
only a sprinkling of snow at the foot of it,--sprinklings of snow at the
foot of each humbler grave-mound. Motionless in the frosty air rested
the pointed church-spire, and through the frosty air, higher and higher
up the arch of heaven, soared the unpausing moon. Around and below and
above her, the stars which no science can number; yet not less difficult
to number are the thoughts, desires, aspirations which, in a space of
time briefer than a winter's night, can pass through the infinite deeps
of a human soul.

From his stand by the Gothic tomb, Kenelm looked along the churchyard
for the infant's grave which Lily's pious