Jenny Winge lay buried at the farthest end of the cemetery near the chapel on a grassy slope, covered with daisies. There were only a few graves. On the border of the slope cypresses had been planted, but they were still very small, like toy trees with their pointed green tops on straight brown trunks, reminding one of the pillars in a cloister arcade. Her grave was a little way from the others; it was only a pale grey mound of earth, the grass round it having been trodden down when it was being dug. The sun shone on it and the dark cypresses formed a wall behind it. Covering his face with his hands, Gunnar bent on his knees until his head rested on the faded wreaths. The weariness of spring weighted his limbs, the blood flowed aching with sorrow and regret at every beat of his heavy heart. Jenny—Jenny—Jenny—he heard her pretty name in every trill of the birds—and she was dead. Lying far down in the dark. He had cut off a curl from her fair hair and carried it in his pocket-book. He took it out and held it in the sunshine—those poor little filmy threads were the only part of her luxurious, glossy hair the sun could reach and warm. She was dead and gone. There were some pictures of hers ... there had been a short notice about her in the papers. And the mother and sisters mourned her at home, but the real Jenny they had never known, and they knew nothing about her life or her death. The others—those who had known—stared in despair after her, not understanding what they knew. She who lay there was his Jenny; she belonged to him alone. * * * * * Helge Gram had come to him; he had asked and told, wailed and begged: “I don’t understand anything. If you do, Heggen, I beg you to tell me. You know—will you not tell me what you know?” He had not answered. “There was another; she told me so. Who was it? Was it you?” “No.” “Do you know who it was?” “Yes, but I am not going to tell you. It is no good your asking, Gram.” “But I shall go mad if you don’t explain.” “You have no right to know Jenny’s secrets.” “But why did she do it? Was it because of me—of him—or of you?” “No; she did it because of herself.” He had asked Gram to leave him and had not seen him since; he had left Rome. It was in the Borghese garden, two days after the funeral, that Gram had come across him sitting in the sunshine. He was so tired; he had had to see to everything—give satisfactory explanations at the inquest, arrange for the interment, and write to Mrs. Berner that her daughter had died suddenly from heart failure. And all the time he had a kind of satisfaction in the thought that nobody knew of his own sorrow, that the real cause of her death was known only by him and for ever hidden with him. The sorrow had sunk so deep into him that it would for ever be the inmost essence of his soul, and he would never speak of it to any living being.