"What are you weeping about?" I asked.
"Why, here, about this rose. Look what has happened to it."
At this point I took it into my head to display profundity of thought.
"Your tears will wash away the mire," I said with a significant expression.
"Tears do not wash, tears scorch," she replied, and, turning toward the fireplace, she tossed the flower into the expiring flame.
"The fire will scorch it still better than tears," she exclaimed, not without audacity,—and her beautiful eyes, still sparkling with tears, laughed boldly and happily.
I understood that she had been scorched also.
April, 1878.
IN MEMORY OF J. P. VRÉVSKY
In the mire, on damp, stinking straw, under the pent-house of an old carriage-house which had been hastily converted into a field military hospital in a ruined Bulgarian hamlet, she had been for more than a fortnight dying of typhus fever.