ular, and yet how full were both their hearts even
then. And that long sweet embrace so startlingly interrupted! Ah! what
a day that had been! One day out of a whole lifetime. Standing here on
this doubly hallowed spot, it seems to her that an eternity of
unutterable wretchedness would not be too great a price to pay for just
that one day over again. But he is gone. Whether their love had been
the most sacred that ever blessed the lot of mortal here below, or the
unhallowed, inexorably forbidden thing it really is, matters nothing
now. Death has decided, and from his arbitration there is no appeal.

She throws herself upon the sward: there in the shade of the mimosa
trees where they had sat together. All Nature is calm and at peace,
and, with the withdrawal of man, the wild creatures of the earth seem to
have reclaimed their own. A little duiker buck steps daintily along
beneath the thorn fence of the ostrich camp, and the grating, metallic
cackle of the wild guinea-fowl is followed by the appearance of quite a
large covey of those fine game birds, pecking away, though ever with an
air of confirmed distrust, within two score yards of the pale, silent
mourner, seated there. The half-whistling, half-twanging note of the
yellow thrush mingles with the melodious call of a pair of blue cranes
stalking along in the grass, and above the drowsy, measured hum of bees
storing sweetness from the flowering aloes, there arises the heavier
boom of some great scarabaeus winging his way in blundering, aimless
fashion athwart the balmy and sensuous evening air.

The sun sinks to the western ridge--the voices of animal and insect life
swell in harmonious chorus, louder and louder, in that last hour of
parting day. His golden beams, now horizontal, sweep the broad and
rolling plains in a sea of fire, throwing out the rounded spurs of the
Kabousie Hills into so many waves of vivid green. Then the flaming
chariot of day is gone.

And in the unearthly hush of the roseate afterglow, that pale,
heart-broken mourner wends her way home. Home! An empty house, where
the echo of a footfall sounds ghostly and startling; an abode peopled
with reminiscences of the dead--meet companionship for a dead and empty
heart.

Never so dead--never so empty--as this evening. Never since the first
moment of receiving the awful news has she felt so utterly crushed, so
soul-weary as here to-night. "How was it all to end?" had been their
oft-spok