THE SCARF OF THE
BELOVED
Author of "The Tortoise-Shell Cat" and "The Remorse of Professor Panebianco"
THE night was dark and gloomy, but for him it was better so; the thick darkness, the approaching storm, all made detection less probable. Lowering clouds, scurrying across the sky, dimmed the sickly rays of the pale moon. The wind, soughing in the branches of the cypresses and among the ghostly tombstones, seemed to carry indignant and mournful whisperings from those graves that had escaped the desecration the others had experienced. Ever and anon, the faint, scared chirp of some homeward fluttering bird came softly to his ear.
The night was almost breathless with expectancy of the coming storm. The lurid flash of the lightning made the dense darkness almost palpable. The fitful warning of those vivid flashes urged haste upon him; he must complete his work before the storm broke in its concentrated fury.
His spade struck heavily against a leaden coffin. He stopped digging and whistled cautiously for his assistant. In a few minutes the coffin had been pried open, and the shroud pulled out, bringing rudely with it the cold clay that lay sleeping so heavily in death's long slumber. Presently the body fell with heavy thud upon the bed of the wagon that waited just without the cemetery gates. The second man covered it with sacking, climbed upon the wagon, and drove away. The first man began to fill in the rifled grave with earth.
His task completed, he paused for a moment as he contemplated the mound rising above that hollow mockery of a grave. A sudden premonition as of evil about to fall upon him oppressed his spirit. With uncontrollable impulse, he caught up his tools and fled from the spot.
The storm was approaching apace. The muttering of the thunder could be heard more distinctly as it grew slowly in volume and then died reluctantly and threateningly away among the surrounding hills. The moon looked down from among the scurrying clouds, her pale and baleful gleams lighting the solitary scene with ghostly light.
Among the treetops the vanguards of the tempest rustled and tossed the branches with a sound as of souls sighing in durance. The usual calm night-calls of insects were hushed before the approach of the storm; only the occasional guttural croak of a bullfrog disturbed the chill hush that had fallen upon nature. A bird's timid, half-affrighted twitter came from the bushes near at hand, and the man glanced casually in that direction before turning homeward.
As he glanced, he described in the moon's fitful light a soft, fluttering thing on the ground at his feet. He leaned down and picked it up. It was a woman's silken shawl, such a thing as his sweetheart wound about her delicate shoulders when the evening breezes blew chill. Whence had it come?
Even as he asked himself, he knew: it had fallen from the body of that dead whom he had disturbed in its
