"The man looked at her as if to fix her image upon his soul forever, and said, repeating her words: 'Good-bye, God bless you!'
"Then he walked quickly off into the park, and away, never looking back. The lady sank down on a seat by the water's edge. For a long time I watched her, and she did not move. When, finally, she arose and walked away, I felt that I was seeing her, and I also had seen the man, for the last time. And so it was. I have watched for them in vain. The man has gone to the ends of the earth. That I know by the look on his face and hers. She will never see him again, nor will she walk by these waters where she used to walk with him. But why? That is what puzzles me!"
"What fools these mortals be!" said the Pale Peacock, without the least idea that any one else had ever before made that remark.
Pale Death with even tread knocks at the threshold of rich and poor. "Pallida mors æquam pulsat," etc. One day the Purple Herring died, and the Pale Peacock suffered as suffer those who love and are bereaved. Little cared she for longer life, and she wanted to pine away. She went to a policeman on the corner, and said: "Tell me how to pine."
"What now! What now!" said the policeman and he gave her no assistance.
But she must pine. She wanted to pine away. She wandered on and met the Cream-Colored Cat, and to her she told her tale. Now, the Cream-Colored Cat had herself learned to pine, having lost her loving mistress, and, being of an affable and affectionate nature, she at once revealed the secret of pining to the Pale Peacock, and they joined forces and pined together. And they pined, and they pined, and they pined. They pined until they became a Sublimated Substance—(just what a Sublimated Substance is does not matter in this story)—and they pined along until they became something so intangible they were almost like a little fog; that is, they were like a young fog, for as a fog gets older and begins to dissipate, it gets thinner, so that the younger a fog is, the thicker it is. Finally it becomes a vapor. And they became what may be called an Evanescent Vapor, until all was lost in the Empyrean. And the souls of the Pale Peacock and the Purple Herring were at last commingled.
Perhaps it was so in the end with the souls of John and Agnes.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE RELEASE