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He saw her again as she had been one ether by the sluice of the streae, with all fairyland about them and in their hearts She had throrap about her head and stolen down there by devious ways, according to the appointed, as he cala dress, buckled shoes, and knee-breeches all complete How marvelous she had been then--a sweet nylorified by thepallor of sun-kissed skin, her eyes looking at him like stars beneath her shawl They had said very little; they had stood there at the sluice gate, with his arainst hi out at the sheeny surface of the sloing streaht breeze, stole araith after wraith of waterwoods
Or, once more, clearer than all else he re the delight of revealing hio, as she had coain in her sun-bonnet and print dress, with the dew shining about her on grass and hedge, and the haze of a su the intensity of the blue sky above He had called her then gently by naht with love and fear and sudden wonder He remembered even noith a reflection of arden flowers
This, then, had been the drea and the end
That end was even more terrible than he had conceived possible on that horrible Friday ram from her father
He had never before understood the sordidness of her surroundings, as when, an hour ago, he had stood at the grave-side, his eyes wandering fro elm box with the silver plate and the wreath of flowers, to the mourners on the other side--her father in his broadcloth, his heavy, srotesque sorrow; her mother, with her crimson, tear-stained cheeks, her elaborate black, her intolerable crape, and her jet-hung mantle
Even these people had been seen by hiht them simple honest folk, creatures of the soil, yet wholesome, natural, and sturdy And now that the jeas lost the setting orse than eem He had seen her in her bed on the Sunday, her fallen face, her sunken eyes, all framed in the detestable whiteness of linen and waxen flowers, yet as pathetic and as appealing as ever, and as necessary to his life It was then that the supreme fact had first penetrated to his consciousness, that he had lost her--the fact which, driven ho crowd co Squire, the el him down on this couch, crushed, broken, and hopeless, like young ivy after a thunderstorm