ographs of the dead on
porcelain let into them. One was the picture of a beautiful young woman,
who had been the wife of the local magnate; an eternal love was vowed
to her in the inscription, but now, the sacristan said, with nothing of
irony, the magnate was married again, and lived in that prettiest house
of the village. He seemed proud of the monument, as the thing worthiest
the attention of the strangers, and he led them with less apparent
hopefulness to the unfinished chapel representing a Gethsemane, with the
figure of Christ praying and his apostles sleeping. It is a subject much
celebrated in terra-cotta about Carlsbad, and it was not a novelty to
his party; still, from its surroundings, it had a fresh pathos, and
March tried to make him understand that they appreciated it. He knew
that his wife wished the poor man to think he had done them a great
favor in showing it; he had been touched with all the vain shows of
grief in the poor, ugly little place; most of all he had felt the exile
of those who had taken their own lives and were parted in death from
the more patient sufferers who had waited for God to take them. With a
curious, unpainful self-analysis he noted that the older members of the
party, who in the course of nature were so much nearer death, did not
shrink from its shows; but the young girl and the young man had not
borne to look on them, and had quickly escaped from the place,
somewhere outside the gate. Was it the beginning, the promise of that
reconciliation with death which nature brings to life at last, or was
it merely the effect, or defect, of ossified sensibilities, of toughened
nerves?

"That is all?" he asked of the spectral sacristan.

"That is all," the man said, and March felt in his pocket for a coin
commensurate to the service he had done them; it ought to be something
handsome.

"No, no," said Stoller, detecting his gesture. "Your money a'n't good."

He put twenty or thirty kreutzers into the hand of the man, who regarded
them with a disappointment none the less cruel because it was so
patient. In France, he would have been insolent; in Italy, he would have
frankly said it was too little; here, he merely looked at the money and
whispered a sad "Danke."

Burnamy and Miss Triscoe rose from the grassy bank outside where they
were sitting, and waited for the elders to get into their two-spanner.

"Oh, have I lost my glove in there?" said Mrs. March, looking at her
hands and such