I remember next being in my own bedroom. I was taking off the cavalier's dress, and I felt like a traveller who had returned from some far and beautiful land. I never wept, nor even sighed. And I remember the rest of that strange and ghostly day, the silence of the house, and the room beyond the pretty corridor that held a thing stranger than anything on earth or in the sea. It rained slightly towards dusk. I was looking out of a window on to the garden, later--it may have been midnight for aught I know, I came down the painted corridor, and entered the bedroom. A lamp was burning, and on the bed lay something small and straight, covered with a sheet. I drew away the sheet, and saw the face I had known so well; just the same it looked, only smaller and more helpless, and the smile had faded away into a vague, beseeching look. Then I remember days that passed, and one day when Wilder said to me, "You will not come?" "Where?" I asked. "To the graveyard." I was in the library when he spoke. I shook my head. He left the room; and a little later I heard heavy footsteps, and the tolling of a bell in the distance. I counted, one, two, three--sixteen, then the bell ceased. CHAPTER XXII THE END "--And the ballade humbly prays, The tribute of your sighs, For the hawke's blinde little eyes, --And the cavalier who lies By the four cross ways." The little falcon came back last night. It has been weeks away, but it came back last night, and I feel it even now pinching at my wrist. It seems to say, "Hurry, you have nearly finished." It seems anxious for me to go with it. Where? I do not know. I can scarcely write. I am half-blind with what? God only knows. Not tears, for I have no tears left. A darkness has stolen over my brain. In writing this story I have drawn the past up to me like an unwilling ghost: I have kissed it on the forehead, mouth, and eyes, and now that my story is finished it has slipped back into the darkness, and I am left alone. They have buried Geraldine. Not in the little church in the park, where all the Wilders are buried; she has a grave of her own outside the church, and on the marble headstone is the name "Beatrice Sinclair." But I shall be buried in the church, and I know that my tablet will bear the inscription, "Sir Gerald Wilder, Kt." so that even our dust may not meet,--what matter? I am not afraid to die; in fact, if I could be glad about anything, I should now be glad. Death seems to me such a little withered, contemptible figure, for ever jealous of Love--yet sometimes death seems to me like a white marble portico, seen down an alley of cypress trees, under a sky all dark with autumn.