* * * * * And now, in the deep dead-of-night silence, Christabel went on her lonely pilgrimage to her first lover's grave. Oh, happy summer day when, sitting by her side outside the Maidenhead coach, all her own through life, as it seemed, he told her how, if she had the ordering of his grave, she was to bury him in that romantic churchyard, hidden in a cleft of the hill. She had not forgotten this even amidst the horror of his fate, and had told the vicar that Mr. Hamleigh's grave must be at Minster and no otherwhere. Then had come his relations, suggesting burial-places with family associations--vaults, mausoleums, the pomp and circumstance of sepulture. But Christabel had been firm; and while the others hesitated a paper was found in the dead man's desk requesting that he might be buried at Minster. How lonely the world seemed in this solemn pause between night and morning. Never before had Christabel been out alone at such an hour. She had travelled in the dead of the night, and had seen the vague dim night-world from the window of a railway carriage--but never until now had she walked across these solitary hills after midnight. It seemed as if for the first time in her life she were alone with the stars. How difficult it was in her present state of mind to realize that those lights, tremulous in the deep blue vault, were worlds, and combinations of worlds--almost all of them immeasurably greater than this earth on which she trod. To her they seemed living watchers of the night--solemn, mysterious beings, looking down at her with all-understanding eyes. She had an awful feeling of their companionship as she looked up at them--a mystic sense that all her thoughts--the worst and best of them--were being read by that galaxy of eyes. Strangely beautiful did the hills and the sky--the indefinite shapes of the trees against the edge of the horizon, the mysterious expanse of the dark sea--seem to her in the night silence. She had no fear of any human presence, but there was an awful feeling in being, as it were, for the first time in her life alone with the immensities. Those hills and gorges, so familiar in all phases of daylight, from sunrise to after set of sun, assumed Titanic proportions in this depth of night, and were as strange to her as if she had never trodden this path before. What was the wind saying, as it came moaning and sobbing along the deep gorge through which the river ran?--what did the wind say as she crossed the narrow bridge which trembled under her light footfall? Surely there was some human meaning in that long minor wail, which burst suddenly into a wild unearthly shriek, and then died away in a low sobbing tone, as of sorrow and pain that grew dumb from sheer exhaustion, and not because there was any remission of pain or sorrow.