She let her taper trail on the stones. Her pilgrimage was a failure. The night and its horrid suggestions had accomplished no degeneration for her; she might as well have come by day, or spared at any time her limbs the cold, her nostrils this infliction. And there she faced and accepted the truth. What she had been was gone, what she was so must she remain. Her brain in its absolute modernity must help her to endure and to regulate her life; from her ancestors she would receive no further help, neither now nor ever. From all miasmatic obsessions rising out of the crypt in her soul she was free henceforth; the crypt itself had vanished into that eternity so far from the corruption about her. She lifted her head suddenly with a sensation of liberty, of independence, which even Hungary and her intimate spiritual absorption of her American lover had not given her. Then she went forward and knelt at the foot of Rudolf’s coffin. She had rejected dogmas and theologies, but she still could pray; for she had perfect faith in an overruling power, who, if great enough to manage the universe, must be great enough to answer prayer without upsetting the balance of His machinery. And prostrate at the foot of the ugly bronze coffin under half its height of brittle wreaths, that held the clay of the warmest nature she had ever known, of the only being she had deeply loved until now, of the Hapsburg whose light might have raised him so high in history and had gone out in folly and dishonor, she had her moment of profound tribute to the dead, of utter abnegation of self. When she rose from her knees she entered the recess, and pushing aside the old wreaths with their emblazoned streamers, the gifts of kings, and princes, of family, and illustrious subjects, she pressed her wet face for a moment to the head of the coffin, then walked rapidly from the inner crypt, down the lane between the older dead, and up the stair.