‘No, nothing of the sort,’ he answered. ‘Only it was too dreadful. That lovely face! To see it like that—and know that is what it is coming to!’
‘You looked as horrid yourself,’ I returned.
‘I don’t doubt it. We all did. But why?’
‘Why, just because of the blueness,’ I answered.
‘Yes—the blueness, no doubt. That was all. But there it was, you know.’
Clara came out smiling. All her horror had vanished. I was looking into the hole as she turned the last corner. When she first appeared, her face was ‘like one that hath been seven days drowned;’ but as she advanced, the decay thinned, and the life grew, until at last she stepped from the mouth of the sepulchre in all the glow of her merry youth. It was a dumb show of the resurrection.
As we went back to the inn, Clara, who was walking in front with her father, turned her head and addressed me suddenly.
‘You see it was all a sham, Wilfrid!’ she said.
‘What was a sham? I don’t know what you mean,’ I rejoined.
‘Why that,’ she returned, pointing with her hand. Then addressing her father, ‘Isn’t that the Eiger,’ she asked—‘the same we rode under yesterday?’