“Delicta juventutis, et ignorantias ejus, quoesumus, ne memineris, Domine; sed secundum magnam misericordiam tuam memor esto illius in gloria claritatis tuoe.”

On the stone floor Beryl knelt, with her brother’s icy hand clasped against her cheek, and as she watched, the twitching of the muscles ceased, the lips so long distorted, took on their old curves of beauty.  A marble pallor blanched the dark stain of the branded cheek, and the Bertie of innocent youth came slowly out of the long eclipse.

Death, God’s most tender angel, laid her divine lips upon the scars of sin, that vanished at her touch; drew her white fingers across the lines and shadows of suffering time, and leaving the halo of eternal peace upon the frozen features, gave back to Beryl her beautiful Bertie of old.

The sun was setting; and far away the ice domes and minarets of immemorial mountains took on the burnished similitude of the New Jerusalem, which only the exiled saw from lonely Patmos.

Lennox Dunbar lifted his wife from the form of the sleeper, whose ransomed soul had entered early into Rest; and folded her tenderly to the heart that henceforth was her refuge from all earthly woes.

At midnight, the brooding silence of the snow-hooded solitude was broken by the tolling of the monastery bell; and while all the mountain echoes responded to the slow knell for the departed soul, there rose from the chapel under the cliffs, the solemn chant of the monks for their dead: 

“Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.”

“Give them eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.”

The end.