86
��THE GRANITE MONTHLY.
��cemetery, and set the bier upon the ground, while the pickers and spades- men quickly dug a grave in one corner of the inclosure. A great foreboding filled Edgar's heart, but the automatic movements and the continued silence of the strange jjeople held him spell- bound. The black covering still lay upon the bier. The solitary old man took his jjlace at one end of the grave, opened his book, and, in a hard,, ex- pressionless voice, began to read, while the rest stood about the grave with fixed and vacant countenance-s. Tlie words of the priest, for such he seemed to be, were an unintelligible jargon to Edgar ; the separate words were dis- tinct enough, it is true, but they were jumbled together in hopeless confusion. A crow flew by, overhead, with a hoarse " caw, caw," which sounded singularly like the voice of the priest. Not a leaf stirred upon the trees ; the very air seemed laid and dead. At length the priest stopped, and the pall-bearers drew back the black covering of the bier. There lay I.,inda, pale and dead, with a chaplet of green vines wreathed in the gleam of her hair. With a great cry Edgar Somerton threw himself upon the bier, and clasped her lifeless form in his arms. A frightful tumult of an- gry voices arose around him. A noise like the rush of a hurricane sounded in his ears, and his senses forsook him.
vn.
" It is plain that his reason was shaken by that imfortunate blow on the head," said Mr. Morse to Miss Walker, who held in her hand a roll of papers from which she had just been reading. " It is plain that his reason was shaken ; such cases are very common."
Edgar Somerton had returned to his lodgings that night as pale as a ghost. He sat in his room all night writing as fast as his pen would move. The next morning he paid his account with Mrs, Odlin, in spite of her grief and wonder, and went away l)y the early coach, leaving nothing behind him but a roll of manuscrijit, which he recjuested Mrs. Odlin to deliver into the hands
��of Miss Walker. In this roll she found a clear though impassioned narrative of all that had befallen him since he had gone a-Maying with her more than a month before. " I do not expect ever to see you again," the manuscript concluded, " for I bear in my heart a pain that can never know relief. What I shall do with the remnant of my life 1 do not yet know."
Miss W'alker shivered a little when she had finished it, but like a wise woman she carried the mystery to her betrothed for solution. '"It is plain that his reason was shaken," Mr. Morse explained. " This Mr. Somer- ton seems to have been of a melan- choly and romantic cast of mind, just the temper that is most susceptible to hallucination. The first meeting or two which he imagines he had with the young girl were probably dreams, as he himself seems to have suspected, and all the others have happened since he received ths unfortunate injury upon his head."
'"I suppose your explanation is the true one," said Miss W^alker, '" and they did say that he behaved himself very oddly at the last. But I can not help feeling that it is all very weird and strange." And with a little shudder she laid the manuscript in an old chest, when she went up stairs again, where she never ventiyed to disturb it after- ward.*
Miss Walker became Mrs. Morse in September, and lived in New Haven for seven years, when she died, bitterly lamented by her husband. Edgar Somerton passed the winter in Boston, giving himself heart and soul to a mis- sionary work that was being carried on in the poorer quarter of the city. April came round once more, and Mr. Somerton one day informed his friend and fellow-worker, Arthur Blake, that he wished to make a brief visit to Concord. Mr. Blake, who had noticed some eccentricities in his friend's con- duct, durinif the ])ast week, and wIkv
��*See note at the beginning of the nai- irttive.
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