As it passed out of sight, I heard the wheels cease, one by one, their crunch and grind on the gravelled road up the slope of the grave-yard.  I knew they had reached that hill-side where the dead of Ridgefield lie calmer than its living; and presently the long-drawn notes of that hymn-tune consecrated to such occasions—­old China—­rose and fell in despairing cadences on my ear.  If ever any music was invented for the express purpose of making mourners as distracted as any external thing can make them, it is the bitter, hopeless, unrestrained wail of this tune.  There is neither peace nor resignation in it, but the very exhaustion of raving sorrow that heeds neither God nor man, but cries out, with the soulless agony of a wind-harp, its refusal to be comforted.

At length it was over, and still in that same dead calm Josephine came home to me.  Mrs. Bowen was frightened, Mr. Bowen distressed.  I could not think what to do, at first; but remembering how sometimes a little thing had utterly broken me down from a regained calmness after loss, some homely association, some recall of the past, I begged of Mr. Bowen to bring up from the village Frank’s knapsack, which he had found in one of his men’s hands,—­the poor fellow having taken care of that, while he lost his own:  “For the captain’s wife,” he said.  As soon as it came, I took from it Frank’s coat, and his cap and sword.  My heart was in my mouth as I entered Josephine’s room, and saw the fixed quiet on her face where she sat.  I walked in, however, with no delay, and laid the things down on her bed, close to where she sat.  She gave one startled look at them and then at me; her face relaxed from all its quiet lines; she sank on her knees by the bedside, and, burying her head in her arms, cried, and cried, and cried, so helplessly, so utterly without restraint, that I cried, too.  It was impossible for me to help it.  At last the tears exhausted themselves; the dreadful sobs ceased to convulse her; all drenched and tired, she lifted her face from its rest, and held out her arms to me.  I took her up, and put her to bed like a child.  I hung the coat and cap and sword where she could see them.  I made her take a cup of broth, and before long, with her eyes fixed on the things I had hung up, she fell asleep, and slept heavily, without waking, till the next morning.

I feared almost to enter her room when I heard her stir; I had dreaded her waking,—­that terrible hour that all know who have suffered, the dim awakening shadow that darkens so swiftly to black reality; but I need not have dreaded it for her.  She told me afterward that in all that sleep she never lost the knowledge of her grief; she did not come into it as a surprise.  Frank had seemed to be with her, distant, sad, yet consoling; she felt that he was gone, but not utterly,—­that there was drear separation and loneliness, but not forever.

When I went in, she lay there awake, looking at her trophy, as she came to call it, her eyes with all their light quenched and sodden out with crying, her face pale and unalterably sad, but natural in its sweetness and mobility.  She drew me down to her and kissed me.