The Duke approached the cottage, saying to himself– “I know this place, and I do not wish to see it again.” Before the wooden gate of the tiny garden he paused. A few modest flowers were growing in neat beds–pinks, wallflowers, and sweet williams; beside the closed door was a lavender bush. The Duke’s sensation of dread deepened. He noticed that a white blind hung behind each of the four windows. He felt that he was there against his will. Peaceful and lovely as the scene was, it was one from which he would willingly have fled. He left the garden and wandered away into the little wood and seated himself under a pine tree and took his head in his hands. And as he sat there he heard the church bell tolling. “I am not going,” he said to himself, and for a while he was resolute and would not move; yet presently he rose and went back to the cottage. The door was half open now. He pushed wide the garden gate and entered; he was acutely conscious of the scent of the simple flowers and the tolling of the bell. Without knocking he entered. Two men were in the narrow passage carrying before them a coffin. Philip Wharton found himself face to face with it; it was held upright, and the name-plate was near his eyes. He read, “_Aged nineteen_.” He heard a woman sobbing in the room into which the coffin was being taken, and he peered through the crack of the door. On a humble bed lay the wasted form of a young girl from which the soul had recently departed. Philip Wharton passed out of the house, out of the garden, and down the meadow. “I am sorry,” he said; he had never sincerely spoken those words before. He walked till he came to the church, and then he entered the graveyard, and seated himself on an old sunken tomb and watched the poor funeral procession that presently wound through the lych-gate. When they had all left and he was again alone, he walked down the sloping churchyard path and looked at the new-made grave. A simple headstone was already in place; it bore no name, but only the date and the words– “A broken and a contrite heart, O Lord, Thou wilt not despise.” Philip Wharton put his hand before his eyes; he felt sorry and afraid. All the women who had ever loved him seemed to lie buried in that humble grave. Love itself, compact of a thousand graces, a thousand transports, which had been made manifest to him under so many different shapes, in so many climes, seemed to have fallen and died at last and to lie buried here with Lucy.… He took his hand from his eyes and saw about him the poor Spanish lodging, the distant window with the fig and myrtle from which the sun had now departed. He sat up shivering. “What dreams!” he muttered. “What dreams!” He found his eyes wet with tears; he rose and held on to the back of the chair. For one awful moment he believed in God. Then he shook off the oppression. “She died as I must die,” he said. “Why not?”