CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
PITCHERS AND STARS
I
Moonlight filled the open space and flooded the temple with a bath of bluish white.
Jerome knelt beside the grave in the shadow of great palms. In the midst of this world of silence he suddenly felt a little self-conscious. Impulse, he feared, had carried him to lengths which it would be rather difficult to explain. Yet she was the woman he had loved, and men can never forget these things.
“I must go back, now,” he thought.
Slowly he raised his eyes, and was glad of the stars and the moon. It required the stars and the moon and the pounding of one’s own heart at a time like this to keep a man sane. He clung, rather, to the familiar, static facts in his life—a life now so changed, which had once been packed with all that was familiar and unchanging.
Stella lay dead at his feet, and on the little altar out there in the moonlight was the offering placed at the threshold of the gods for Stella’s soul. He bowed his head a moment, shaken with amazement and confused regret. When he raised his head, however, and was about to take his departure, Jerome started. He fancied he had seen something stir in the moonlight. In another moment he was sure of it.
The paper door of the temple was slowly moving. His finger nails gripped hard against his palms, and he braced himself by another swift glance at the unheeding dome of night.
Yes, the door of the temple was opening—slowly, very slowly; first only a hair’s breadth, then wider and wider, till the aperture was sufficient to permit a slender, white-clad form to slip through and out into the soft radiance of the night.