"_
Below, as vivid as the inscription, there stood out the maker's name,
and of the town where he lived.
* * * * *
So she lay there, reflected Maggie. It had ended in that. A mound of
earth, cracking a little, and sunken. She lay there, her nervous
fingers motionless and her stammer silent. And could there be a more
eloquent monument of what she was...? Then she remembered herself, and
signed herself with the cross, while her lips moved an instant for the
repose of the poor girlish soul. Then she stepped up again on to the
path to go home.
It was as she came near the church gate that she understood herself,
that she perceived why she had come, and was conscious for the first
time of her real attitude of soul as she had stood there, reading the
inscription, and, in a flash, there followed the knowledge of the
inevitable meaning of it all.
In a word it was this.
She had come there, she told herself, to triumph, to gloat. Oh! she
spared herself nothing, as she stood there, crimson with shame, to
gloat over the grave of a rival. Amy was nothing less than that, and
she herself--she, Margaret Marie Deronnais--had given way to jealousy
of this grocer's daughter, because .
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