Who knows? But there was Fletcher
looking on the corpse of his wife, and waving over her face the light of
the small cruse he held in his hand! Was he moved, as he saw the still,
death-bound features, that once could not contain the expression which
the leaping heart, with that burning fire in it of that land of the sun,
tried in vain to force into it; the eye, too, that flashed and leapt as
never is seen in our country of humid fogs, stifling the inborn heat and
blearing the vision; and those arms that entwined him so as the vine
holds the olive in its grasp, as if it would give the juice which fires
and inebriates, for the oil that calms, and fattens, and sustains? All
over that lithe body which enabled her, when he saw her first in the
land of her fathers, to bound and flee as if she had wings, and these
beautiful as the monaul's, ay, and enabled her, too, to play round him
in that Eastern gaiety which had charmed him, if he ever loved her, and
even for a time made his home like Fairydom! Who shall say there was no
movement in his stern features, no moisture in his eye, no trembling of
the lip, no tremor of the body, as he might have read the last effort of
nature in the expression of calm forgiveness or continued affection? Who
could read _him_?
At midnight, two days after, Kalee slept in Logie kirkyard.
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