rd a physician say,--"the
mysterious power that the dying so often have to fix the very hour of
their approaching end!" It was so in John Richling's case. It was as he
said. Had Mary and Alice not come when they did, they would have been
too late. He "tarried but a night;" and at the dawn Mary uttered the
bitter cry of the widow, and Doctor Sevier closed the eyes of the one
who had committed no fault,--against this world, at least,--save that he
had been by nature a pilgrim and a stranger in it.

CHAPTER LIX.

AFTERGLOW.

Mary, with Alice holding one hand, flowers in the other, was walking one
day down the central avenue of the old Girod Cemetery, breaking the
silence of the place only by the soft grinding of her footsteps on the
shell-walk, and was just entering a transverse alley, when she stopped.

Just at hand a large, broad woman, very plainly dressed, was drawing
back a single step from the front of a tomb, and dropping her hands from
a coarse vase of flowers that she had that moment placed on the narrow
stone shelf under the tablet. The blossoms touched, without hiding, the
newly cut name. She had hung a little plaster crucifix against it from
above. She must have heard the footfall so near by, and marked its
stoppage; but, with the oblivion common to the practisers of her
religion, she took no outward notice. She crossed herself, sank upon her
knees, and with her eyes upon the shrine she had made remained thus. The
tears ran down Mary's face. It was Madame Zenobie. They went and lived
together.

The name of the street where their house stood has slipped me, as has
that of the clean, unfrequented, round-stoned way up which one looked
from the small cottage's veranda, and which, running down to their old
arched gate, came there to an end, as if that were a pretty place to
stop at in the shade until evening. Grass grows now, as it did then,
between the round stones; and in the towering sycamores of the reddened
brick sidewalk the long, quavering note of the cicada parts the wide
summer noonday silence. The stillness yields to little else, save now
and then the tinkle of a mule-bell, where in the distance the softly
rumbling street-car invites one to the centre of the town's activities,
or the voice of some fowl that, having laid an egg, is asserting her
right to the credit of it. Some forty feet back, within a mossy brick
wall that stands waist-high, surmounted by a white, open fence, the
green wooden