Duvernois leaned forward in his saddle, and gazed at both without a word or a movement.
"Oh, what could have led her to this?" groaned the physician, already too sure that life had departed.
"Insanity," was the monotoned response of the statue on horseback.
The funeral took place two days later: the coffin-plate bore the inscription, "Alice Leighton, aged 23." Duvernois read it, and said not a word.
"If you don't claim her as your wife," whispered the brother, "you may find it difficult to marry again."
"Do you think I shall want to marry again?" responded the widower with an icy stare.
He was aware that he had lost a shame and a torment, and not aware that she might have been an honor and a joy, if only he had been able to love.
J. W. de Forest.
"How Mother Did It."
The year 1839--that is, the year in which I was born--is of no manner of importance to myself or anybody else. The year 1859--that is, the year in which I began to live (Charlie and I got married that year)--is of considerable importance to myself and to somebody else. The two decades forming the interim between those years constitute my Dark Age, in which I teethed and measled and whooping-coughed, and went to school, and wore my hair in two long pig-tails, and loved molasses candy, and regarded a school-room as purgatory, a ball-room as heaven--when I sang and danced and grew as the birds and grasshoppers and flowers sing and dance and grow, because they having nothing else to do.