t, hanging in pink clusters of loveliness with scalloped
lips of purity, that even the sunbeam sends a photograph of his heart
through them and every moonbeam writes in it the romance of its life.
And the skies all day long, reflecting in its heart, tells to the
cool green leaves that shadow it the story of its life, and it
catches and holds the sympathy of the tiniest zephyr, from the way it
flutters to the patter of their little feet.

All things of Nature love it--the clouds, the winds, the very stars,
and sun, because love--undying love--is the soul of God, its Maker.

The rose is red in the rich passion of love, the lily is pale in the
poverty of it; but the crepe-myrtle is pink in the constancy of it.

O bloom of the crepe-myrtle! And none but a lover ever smelled
it--none but a lover ever knew!

She ran up the gentle slope to the old-fashioned garden and threw
herself under the tree from whence the dying odor came. She fell on
her knees--the moonlight over her in fleckings of purification. She
clung to the scaly weather-beaten stem of the tree as she would have
pressed a sister to her breast. Her arms were around it--she knew
it--its very bark.

She seized a bloom that had fallen and crushed it to her bosom and
her cheek.

"O Tom--Tom--why--why did you make me love you here and then leave me
forever with only the memory of it?"

"Twice does it bloom, dear Heart,--can not my love bloom like
it--twice?"

"A-l-i-c-e!"

The voice came from out the distant woods nearby.

The blood leaped and then pricked her like sharp-pointed icicles, and
they all seemed to freeze around and prick around her heart. She
could not breathe.... Her head reeled.... The crepe-myrtle fell on
her and smothered her....

When she awoke Mrs. Westmore sat by her side and was holding her head
while her brother was rubbing her arms.

"You must be ill, darling," said her mother gently. "I heard you
scream. What--"

They helped her to rise. Her heart still fluttered violently--her
head swam.

"Did you call me before--before"--she was excited and eager.

"Why, yes"--smiled her mother. "I said, 'Alice--Alice!'"

"It was not that--no, that was not the way it sounded," she said as
they led her into the house.

CHAPTER XI

THE CASKET AND THE GHOST

Richard Travis could not sleep that night--why, he could not tell.

After he returned from Westmoreland, Mammy Charity brought him his
cocktail, and tidied up his room, and