He listened and listened to the silence.  Surely if she should speak, even from down under the ground he could hear her across this silence which was as a void—­a black and terrible void.

His first pilgrimages were by moonlight, but when the moonless nights came he continued his vigils.  He would have known the way by that time with his eyes shut.

Sometimes he was afraid—­horribly afraid.  He seemed, in the shadows, to descry weird phantom-shapes, moving stealthily; in the silence to hear ghostly whispers; sometimes he fancied he heard the silence itself!  But in the very fear that clutched his throat there was a fascination—­a lure—­that made it impossible to turn back.

His sorrow was exquisite; his terror was exquisite; his loneliness was oh, how exquisite!  Yet in courting them all, here in the dead of night, prone on her grave, he found the only balm he knew—­the only sympathy; for to his fancy the dark and the quiet had always seemed sentient things and he felt that they gave him a sympathy he did not—­could not ask of people.

* * * * *

A breathless night in July found him at the familiar tryst at an earlier hour than was his wont.  He lay upon the grass at her feet with his hands clasped under his head and his face turned up to the stars.  There was moonlight as well as starlight, and in its silvery radiance his features, always pale, had the frigid whiteness of marble.  The wide-open eyes that stared upward to the stars, were larger, darker than in daylight, and more full of brooding; the white brow, with its crown of dark ringlets was whiter and more expansive.

In a dormer-windowed cottage overlooking a rose garden, on Clay Street, an erect gentleman in an uncompromising stock and immaculate ruffles, with narrow blue eyes under a beetling brow, and a somewhat hawk-like nose, sharply questioned a fair and graceful lady, with an anxious expression on her flower-face, as to why “that boy” did not come home to his supper.  But they were used by now, to the boy’s strange, wayward whims, and so did not marvel much.  Only—­they had not seen him since the feat that had set the town ringing with his name and it seemed to them that it would have been natural for him to come home in the flush of his triumph and tell them about it.

Edgar Poe had that day created the sensation of the hour by swimming from the Richmond wharves to Warwick—­a distance of six miles—­in the midsummer sun.

Richmond was a fair and pleasant little city in those days, in spite of the fact that our boy-poet found in it so much to make him melancholy.  “The merriest place in America,” Thackeray called it some years later, and would probably have said the same of it then had he been there.  The blight of Civil War had not touched the cheerful temper of its people; the tenement row had not crowded out grass and flowers.  It was more a large village than a town, with gracious homes—­not elbowing each other for foundation room, but standing comfortably apart, amid their green lawns, and with wide verandahs overhanging their many-flowered gardens.