It opened upon a scrap of white heather which marked the Service for
the Burial of the Dead. Her tears fell upon the faded sprig, and she
brushed her hand swiftly across her eyes, looking more closely as
certain words underlined caught her attention. Other words had been
written by her father's hand very minutely in the margin.
The passage underlined was ... "not to be sorry as men without hope,
for them that sleep ..." and in a moment she guessed that her father
had made that mark on the day of her mother's death. It was like a
message to her, the echo of a cry.
The words in the margin were so small that she had to carry them to
the light to read them. And then they flashed out at her as if
sprung suddenly to light on the white paper. There, in the beloved
handwriting, sure and indelible, she read it, and across the desert
of her heart, voiceless but insistent, there swept the hunger-cry of a
man's soul: OMNIA VINCIT AMOR.
It pulsed through her like an electric current, seeming to overwhelm
every other sensation, shutting her off as it were from the home-world
to which she had fled, how fruitlessly, for healing. Once more
skeleton fingers held hers, shifting to and fro, to and fro, slowly,
ceaselessly, flashing the deep rays that shone from ruby hearts hither
and thither.
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