That silence, and the void which, after each funeral, is waiting for people at home when they return from fresh graves, seemed this time to begin even at the cemetery. The day was calm, pale, with here and there the last yellowed leaves dropping from the trees without a rustle. The funeral procession was belittled amid these wide, pale spaces, which, studded with crosses, seemed endless,--as if, in truth, that cemetery opened into infinity. The black, leafless trees with tops formed of slender branches, as it were, vanishing in the light, gray and white tombstones resembling apparitions, the withered leaves on the ground, covering long and straight alleys,--all these produced at once a genuine impression of Elysian fields of some sort, fields full of deep rest, but full also of deep, dreamy melancholy, certain "cold and sad places" of which the gloomy head of Cæsar dreamed, and to which now was to come one more "animula vagula." The coffin stopped at last above the open grave. The piercing "Requiem æternam" was heard, and then "Anima ejus." Pan Stanislav, through the chaos of his thoughts and impressions, and through the veil of his own sorrow, saw, as in a dream, the stony face and glassy eyes of Pani Emilia, the tears of Marynia, which irritated him at that moment, the pale face of Bukatski, on whose features the expression was evident that his philosophy of life, having no work to do at that graveyard, had left him and Litka's coffin at the gate. When each threw a handful of sand on the coffin-lid, he followed the example of others; when they lowered the coffin on straps into the depth of the grave, and closed the stone doors, something seized him anew by the throat, so that all of which he had been thinking, and had learned hitherto, was changed into one nothingness. He repeated in his soul the simple words: "Till we meet, Litus!"--words which, when he recalled them afterwards, seemed to have no relation to the torturing mental storm within him. This was the end. The funeral procession began to decrease and melt away. After a time Pan Stanislav was roused by the wind, which came from afar from between the crosses. He saw now at the grave Pani Emilia with Marynia, Pani Bigiel, Vaskovski, and Litka's uncle; he said to himself that he would go out last, and waited, repeating in his soul, "Till we meet, Litus!" He was thinking of death, and of this,--that he, too, would come to this place of monuments, and that it is an ocean into which all thoughts, feelings, and efforts are flowing. It seemed to him then as if he and all who were there at the grave, or had returned home, were on a ship sailing straight to the precipice. Of life beyond the grave he had no thought at that moment.