oth loved lay in
state, ere it fared forth on its last journey.

The old house was full of subdued sounds, for as soon as darkness fell,
by ones and twos, men and women were silently admitted and passed as
silently up the staircase to pay their last homage to their martyr.

Nearly all of them had flowers in their hands,--red flowers,--sometimes
only a single spray, but always those fatal geranium blossoms that were
the symbol of the League. They laid them on the white pall, or scattered
them on the folds that swept the ground, till the coffin seemed raised
above a sea of blood.

Every detail of that scene is photographed on my memory. The great room,
hung with black draperies and brilliantly lighted by a multitude of tall
wax candles; the air heavy with incense and the musky odor of the
flowers; the two priests in gorgeous vestments who knelt on either side,
near the head of the coffin, softly intoning the prayers for the dead;
the black-robed nuns who knelt at the foot, silent save for the click of
their rosaries; and the ghostly procession of men and women, many of
them wounded, all haggard and wan, that passed by, and paused to gaze on
the face that lay framed, as it were, beneath a panel of glass in the
coffin-lid, from which the pall was drawn back. Many of them, men as
well as women, were weeping passionately; some pressed their lips to the
glass; others raised their clenched hands as if to register a vow of
vengeance; a few,--a very few,--knelt in prayer for a brief moment ere
they passed on.

I stood at my post, as one of the guard, and watched it all in a queer,
impersonal sort of way, as if my soul was somehow outside my body.

Although I stood some distance away, the quiet face under the glass
seemed ever before my eyes; for I had looked on it before this solemn
ceremonial began. How fair it was,--and yet how strange; though it was
unmarred, unless there was a wound hidden under the strip of white
ribbon bound across the forehead and almost concealed by the softly
waving chestnut hair. But even the peace of death had not been able to
banish the expression of anguish imprinted on the lovely features. Above
the closed eyelids, with their long, dark lashes, the brows were
contracted in a frown, and the mouth was altered, the white teeth
exposed, set firmly in the lower lip. Still she was beautiful, but with
the beauty of a Medusa. I could not think of that face as the one I had
known and loved; it filled me