He had
called her then gently by name, and she had turned her face to him,
alight with love and fear and sudden wonder.... He remembered even now
with a reflection of memory that was nearly an illusion the smell of
yew and garden flowers.
This, then, had been the dream; and today the awakening and the end.
That end was even more terrible than he had conceived possible on that
horrible Friday morning last week, when he had opened the telegram
from her father.
He had never before understood the sordidness of her surroundings, as
when, an hour ago, he had stood at the grave-side, his eyes wandering
from that long elm box with the silver plate and the wreath of
flowers, to the mourners on the other side--her father in his
broadcloth, his heavy, smooth face pulled in lines of grotesque
sorrow; her mother, with her crimson, tear-stained cheeks, her
elaborate black, her intolerable crape, and her jet-hung mantle. Even
these people had been seen by him up to then through a haze of love;
he had thought them simple honest folk, creatures of the soil, yet
wholesome, natural, and sturdy. And now that the jewel was lost the
setting was worse than empty. There in the elm box lay the remnants of
the shattered gem.
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