EM as it was embittered to ME.
I had done all man could to rise after the shock, and accept my life
resignedly--to let my great sorrow come in tenderness to my heart, and
not in despair. It was useless and hopeless. No tears soothed my
aching eyes, no relief came to me from my sister's sympathy or my
mother's love.

On that third morning I opened my heart to them. At last the words
passed my lips which I had longed to speak on the day when my mother
told me of her death.

"Let me go away alone for a little while," I said. "I shall bear it
better when I have looked once more at the place where I first saw
her--when I have knelt and prayed by the grave where they have laid her
to rest."

I departed on my journey--my journey to the grave of Laura Fairlie.

It was a quiet autumn afternoon when I stopped at the solitary station,
and set forth alone on foot by the well-remembered road. The waning sun
was shining faintly through thin white clouds--the air was warm and
still--the peacefulness of the lonely country was overshadowed and
saddened by the influence of the falling year.

I reached the moor--I stood again on the brow of the hill--I looked on
along the path--and there were the familiar garden trees in the
distance, the clear sweeping semicircle of the drive, the high white
walls of Limmeridge House. The chances and changes, the wanderings and
dangers of months and months past, all shrank and shrivelled to nothing
in my mind. It was like yesterday since my feet had last trodden the
fragrant heathy ground. I thought I should see her coming to meet me,
with her little straw hat shading her face, her simple dress fluttering
in the air, and her well-filled sketch-book ready in her hand.

Oh death, thou hast thy sting! oh, grave, thou hast thy victory!

I turned aside, and there below me in the glen was the lonesome grey
church, the porch where I had waited for the coming of the woman in
white, the hills encircling the quiet burial-ground, the brook bubbling
cold over its stony bed. There was the marble cross, fair and white,
at the head of the tomb--the tomb that now rose over mother and
daughter alike.

I approached the grave. I crossed once more the low stone stile, and
bared my head as I touched the sacred ground. Sacred to gentleness and
goodness, sacred to reverence and grief.

I stopped before the pedestal from which the cross rose. On one side
of it, on the side nearest to me, the newly-cut insc