With that unearthly sound still following her, she went up the winding hill-side path, and then slowly descended to the darkness of the churchyard--so sunk and sheltered that it seemed like going down into a vault. Just then the moon leapt from behind an inky cloud, and, in that ghostly light, Christabel saw the pale grey granite cross which had been erected in memory of Angus Hamleigh. It stood up in the midst of nameless mounds, and humble slate tablets, pale and glittering--an unmistakable sign of the spot where her first lover lay. Once only before to-night had she seen that monument. Absorbed in the pursuit of a Pagan scheme of vengeance she had not dared to come within the precincts of the church, where she had knelt and prayed through all the sinless years of her girlhood. To-night some wild impulse had brought her here--to-night, when that crime which she called retribution was on the point of achievement. She went with stumbling footsteps through the long grass, across the low mounds, till she came to that beneath which Angus Hamleigh lay. She fell like a lifeless thing at the foot of the cross. Some loving hand had covered the mound of earth with primroses and violets, and there were low clambering roses all round the grave. The scent of sweetbriar was mixed with the smell of earth and grass. Some one had cared for that grave, although she, who so loved the dead, had never tended it. "Oh, my love! my love!" she sobbed, with her face upon the grass and the primrose leaves, and her arms clasping the granite; "my murdered love--my first, last, only lover--before to-morrow's sun is down your death will be revenged, and my life will be over! I have lived only for that--only for that, Angus, my love, my love!" She kissed the cold wet grass more passionately than she had ever kissed the dead face mouldering underneath it. Only to the dead--to the utterly lost and gone--is given this supreme passion--love sublimated to despair. From the living there is always something kept back--something saved and garnered for an after-gift--some reserve in the mind or the heart of the giver; but to the dead love gives all--with a wild self-abandonment which knows not restraint or measure. The wife who, while this man yet lived, had been so rigorously true to honour and duty, now poured into the deaf dead ears a reckless avowal of love--love that had never faltered, never changed--love that had renounced the lover, and had yet gone on loving to the end. The wind came moaning out of the valley again with that sharp human cry, as of lamentation for the dead.