“Very good of you,” he answers, coldly; “but surely such a place as this is not unaccustomed to the voice of sorrow.”
“No doubt. My impulse was a mistaken one.”
“But kindly meant. You will not sleep less soundly for acting on that impulse, Reginald Westcar.”
He rises as he speaks. He throws his cloak round him, and stands motionless. I take the hint. My mysterious countryman wishes to be alone. Some one that he has loved and lost lies buried here.
“Good-night, sir,” I say, as I move in the direction of the little chapel at the gate. “Neither of us will sleep the less soundly for thinking of the perfect repose that reigns around this place.”
“What do you mean?” he asks.
“The dead,” I reply, as I stretch my hand toward the graves. “Do you not remember the lines in ‘King Lear’?
“‘After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.’”
“But you have never died, Reginald Westcar. You know nothing of the sleep of death.”
For the third time he speaks my name almost familiarly, and—I know not why—a shudder passes through me. I have no time, in my turn, to ask him what he means; for he strides silently away into the shadow of the church, and I, with a strange sense of oppression upon me, returned to my hotel.