her
out. He had seated himself at the fireplace, when she reopened the door.

"Have you forgotten anything?"

"No."

She gave one long, lingering look at the old room. When she was gone,
and the door shut, the stranger filled his glass, and sat at the table
sipping it thoughtfully.

The night outside was misty and damp; the faint moonlight, trying to
force its way through the thick air, made darkly visible the outlines of
the buildings. The stones and walls were moist, and now and then a drop,
slowly collecting, fell from the eaves to the ground. Doss, not liking
the change from the cabin's warmth, ran quickly to the kitchen doorstep;
but his mistress walked slowly past him, and took her way up the winding
footpath that ran beside the stone wall of the camps. When she came
to the end of the last camp, she threaded her way among the stones and
bushes till she reached the German's grave. Why she had come there she
hardly knew; she stood looking down. Suddenly she bent and put one hand
on the face of a wet stone.

"I shall never come to you again," she said.

Then she knelt on the ground, and leaned her face upon the stones.

"Dear old man, good old man, I am so tired!" she said (for we will come
to the dead to tell secrets we would never have told to the living).
"I am so tired. There is light, there is warmth," she wailed; "why am I
alone, so hard, so cold? I am so weary of myself! It is eating my
soul to its core--self, self, self! I cannot bear this life! I cannot
breathe, I cannot live! Will nothing free me from myself?" She pressed
her cheek against the wooden post. "I want to love! I want something
great and pure to lift me to itself! Dear old man, I cannot bear it any
more! I am so cold, so hard, so hard; will no one help me?"

The water gathered slowly on her shawl, and fell on to the wet stones;
but she lay there crying bitterly. For so the living soul will cry to
the dead, and the creature to its God; and of all this crying there
comes nothing. The lifting up of the hands brings no salvation;
redemption is from within, and neither from God nor man; it is wrought
out by the soul itself, with suffering and through time.

Doss, on the kitchen doorstep, shivered, and wondered where his mistress
stayed so long; and once, sitting sadly there in the damp, he had
dropped asleep, and dreamed that old Otto gave him a piece of bread,
and patted him on the head, and when he woke his teeth chattered, and
he moved