Everard could read no more, and throwing the paper from him he buried his face in his hands, and for a few moments gave way to such grief as men seldom feel, and never experience but once in a life-time. He did not weep; his pain was too great for tears; neither did any word escape his livid lips, but his frame shook as with an ague chill, and occasionally a long drawn, moaning sob told how much he suffered, while great drops of sweat gathered thickly upon his face, and in the palms of his hands. No other blow could have smitten him so heavily as he was smitten now. It is true he had felt a great dread lest Rossie should die, but underlying that was always the hope that she would come back again. But all that was ended now, the little ray of sunlight on his horizon had set in gloom, and the night lay dark and heavy around him, with no rift in the black clouds, no light in the future. Rossie was dead, in all her freshness and youthful beauty; Rossie, who had been to him a constant source of pleasure and joy, since he first took her in his arms, a tiny little girl, and kissed her pretty mouth in spite of her remonstrance, “Big boys like oo mustn’t tiss nittle dirls like me.” He had kissed her many times since as his sister, and twice with all the intensity of a lover’s burning passion, and once she had kissed him back, and he knew just where her lips had touched him, and fancied he felt their pressure again, and the perfume of her breath upon his cheek. But, alas, she was dead, and the Austrian skies were bending above her grave in that far-off town with the strange-sounding German name, which he had not stopped to pronounce. “What was the name?” he asked himself, speaking for the first time since he read the fatal news, and reaching mechanically for the paper lying open at his feet. But his eyes were blood-shot and dim, and it took him some time to spell out, letter by letter, the name Haelder-Strauchsen, and to wonder where and what manner of place it was where Rossie died, and if she were lying under the flowers and soft green turf she loved so much in life, and if he should ever see her grave. “Yes, please Heaven!” he said, “I’ll find it some day, and whisper to my darling sleeping there of the love it will be no sin to speak of then. I’ll tell her how with her life my sun of hope went down, never to rise again.”