From the two sentinel poplars that guarded the front, golden leaves were sifting down on the marble floor, and three or four had drifted upon the lap of the quiet figure, while one, bright and rich as autumn gilding could make it, rested like a crown on the silver waves that covered her head.
Down the shining steps trailed the folds of the white merino robe, and around her shoulders was wrapped the blue crape shawl, while a cluster of violets seemed to have slipped from her fingers, and strewed themselves at random on her dress.
Softly Dr. Grey drew near, and his voice was tremulously tender, as he said,—
“Mrs. Carlyle, no barrier divides us now.”
She did not speak, or turn her queenly head, and he laid his hand caressingly on the glistening gray hair.
“My darling, my first and only love—my brave, beautiful ‘Agla,’ may I not tell you, at last, what conscience once forbade my uttering?”
As motionless and silent as the sculptured poppies above her, she took no notice of his passionate pleading, and he sprang down one step directly in front of her.
The white face was turned to the sea, and the large, wide, 463 wonderfully lovely yet mournful gray eyes were gazing fixedly across the waste of water, at a filmy cloud as fine as lace, that like a silver netting caught the full October moon which was lifting itself in the pearly east.
The long black lashes did not droop, nor the steady eyes waver, and with a horrible foreboding Dr. Grey seized her hands. They were rigid and icy. He stooped, caught her to his bosom, and pressed his lips to hers, but they were colder than the marble column against which she leaned; for, one hour before, Vashti Carlyle had fronted her God.
Alone in the autumn evening, sitting there with the golden poplar leaves drifting over her, the desolate woman had held her last communion with the watching ocean that hushed its murmuring, to see her die; and, laying down the galling burden of her sunless, dreary life, she had joyfully and serenely “put on immortality” in that everlasting rest, where “there was no more sea, no more death, neither shall there be any more pain, for the former things are passed away.”