He slept not at all that night. He had thought that his days of poignant emotion were over, that he had worn out the last of it on the blood-soaked fields of Virginia, on nights between days when Death rose with the sun; but up from their long sleep misery and love rose with the vigour of their youth, and claimed him. And the love was for a woman who no longer existed, whose sodden brain doubtless held no memory of him, or remembered only to curse him. He strove to imagine her as she must be. She rose before him in successive images of what she had been: from the night he had met her to the morning of their last interview on the mountain,--a series of images sometimes painful, always beautiful. Then his imagination created her as she must have been during the months of her solitude in the midst of a wild and beautiful country, when in her letters she had sent him so generous and so exquisite a measure of herself; then the last months, when he would have been half mad with love and pity if he had known. Nor was that all: it seemed to him in the torments of that night that he realised for the first time what he had lost, what poignant, enduring, and varied happiness might have been his during the past ten years. Instead, he had had excitement, honours, and mental activity; he had not been happy for an hour. And the possibility of such happiness, of union with the one woman whom he was capable of passionately loving with soul and mind and body, was as dead as his youth, buried with the soul of a woman whose face he would not recognise. She was above ground, this woman, and a different being! He repeated the fact aloud; but it was the one fact his imagination would not grasp and present to his mental vision. It realised her suffering, her morbid despair, her attitude to herself, to the world, and to him, when she had decided to marry Clough; but the hideous metamorphosis of body and spirit was outside its limitations. In the morning he asked his sister-in-law if she would leave California at the end of the week. She was a methodical and slow-moving little person, and demurred for a time, but finally consented to make ready. Her business affairs--which consisted of several unsold ranches--could be left in the hands of an agent; there was little more that her brother-in-law could do. Harold's remains had been temporarily placed in the receiving vault on Lone Mountain. Thorpe went out to the cemetery in the afternoon to make the final arrangements for removing them to England.