"I tried for once to do better; to treat Alice as a woman should be treated. This is my reward--my wedding day."
He lifted her in his arms like a child and as he laid her in her coffin looked at her stonily. "My bride! My Alice!"
Dolly burst into tears. The harshness of his despair gave way as he bent over her for the last time and when he spoke again the tenderness of his voice came back. "My darling! With you I bury every earthly hope; for I take God to witness, in you I have had all my earthly joy!" He walked away and never saw her face again.
The unintelligible service in the church did not rouse him from his torpor and he was only after a long time aware of a strange presence on the altar. Just at the last he looked up into the sanctuary. Little clouds of incense rising from a swinging thurible framed for an instant the face of a priest and Kimberly saw it was the archbishop.
The prelate stood before the tabernacle facing the little church filled with people. But his eyes were fixed on the catafalque and his lips were moving in prayer. Kimberly watched with a strange interest the slender, white hand rise in a benediction over the dead. He knew it was the last blessing of her whom he had loved.
Dolly had dreaded the scene at the grave but there was no scene. Nor could Kimberly ever recollect more than the mournful trees, the green turf, and the slow sinking of a flowered pall into the earth. And at the end he heard only the words of the archbishop, begging that they who remained might, with her, be one day received from the emptiness of this life into one that is both better and lasting.
CHAPTER XLIII
In the evening of the day on which they had buried Alice, and the family were all at The Towers, Dolly, after dinner, asked Doctor Hamilton to walk with her. Robert Kimberly had dined upstairs and Hamilton upon leaving Dolly went up to Kimberly's rooms.
The library door was closed. Hamilton, picking up a book in an adjoining room, made a place under the lamp and sat down to read. It was late when Kimberly opened the closed door. "Do you want to see me, doctor?" he asked abruptly.
"Not particularly. I am not sleepy."