n
the same plane as the tower itself.

He entered the gravel path which would take him behind the tower.
The path, instead of being stony as it had been the night before, was
browned over with a thin coating of mud. At one place in the path
he saw a tuft of stringy roots washed white and clean as a bundle
of tendons. He picked it up--surely it could not be one of the
primroses he had planted? He saw a bulb, another, and another as
he advanced. Beyond doubt they were the crocuses. With a face of
perplexed dismay Troy turned the corner and then beheld the wreck
the stream had made.

The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the ground, and in its
place was a hollow. The disturbed earth was washed over the grass
and pathway in the guise of the brown mud he had already seen, and it
spotted the marble tombstone with the same stains. Nearly all the
flowers were washed clean out of the ground, and they lay, roots
upwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed by the stream.

Troy's brow became heavily contracted. He set his teeth closely,
and his compressed lips moved as those of one in great pain. This
singular accident, by a strange confluence of emotions in him, was
felt as the sharpest sting of all. Troy's face was very expressive,
and any observer who had seen him now would hardly have believed him
to be a man who had laughed, and sung, and poured love-trifles into
a woman's ear. To curse his miserable lot was at first his impulse,
but even that lowest stage of rebellion needed an activity whose
absence was necessarily antecedent to the existence of the morbid
misery which wrung him. The sight, coming as it did, superimposed
upon the other dark scenery of the previous days, formed a sort of
climax to the whole panorama, and it was more than he could endure.
Sanguine by nature, Troy had a power of eluding grief by simply
adjourning it. He could put off the consideration of any particular
spectre till the matter had become old and softened by time. The
planting of flowers on Fanny's grave had been perhaps but a species
of elusion of the primary grief, and now it was as if his intention
had been known and circumvented.

Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by this
dismantled grave, wished himself another man. It is seldom that a
person with much animal spirit does not feel that the fact of his
life being his own is the one qualification which singles it out as a
more hopeful