He wrapped the thoughts in shrouds, but he was again reading.

“A quarter to one o’clock.  I shall not be alive this time to-morrow.  I shall never see Richard now.  I dreamed last night we were in the fields together, and he walked with his arm round my waist.  We were children, but I thought we were married, and I showed him I wore his ring, and he said—­if you always wear it, Clare, you are as good as my wife.  Then I made a vow to wear it for ever and ever...  “It is not mama’s fault.  She does not think as Richard and I do of these things.  He is not a coward, nor am I. He hates cowards.

“I have written to his father to make him happy.  Perhaps when I am dead he will hear what I say.

“I heard just now Richard call distinctly—­Clare, come out to me.  Surely he has not gone.  I am going I know not where.  I cannot think.  I am very cold.”

The words were written larger, and staggered towards the close, as if her hand had lost mastery over the pen.

“I can only remember Richard now a boy.  A little boy and a big boy.  I am not sure now of his voice.  I can only remember certain words.  ‘Clari,’ and ‘Don Ricardo,’ and his laugh.  He used to be full of fun.  Once we laughed all day together tumbling in the hay.  Then he had a friend, and began to write poetry, and be proud.  If I had married a young man he would have forgiven me, but I should not have been happier.  I must have died.  God never looks on me.

“It is past two o’clock.  The sheep are bleating outside.  It must be very cold in the ground.  Good-bye, Richard.”

With his name it began and ended.  Even to herself Clare was not over-communicative.  The book was slender, yet her nineteen years of existence left half the number of pages white.

Those last words drew him irresistibly to gaze on her.  There she lay, the same impassive Clare.  For a moment he wondered she had not moved—­to him she had become so different.  She who had just filled his ears with strange tidings—­it was not possible to think her dead!  She seemed to have been speaking to him all through his life.  His image was on that still heart.

He dismissed the night-watchers from the room, and remained with her alone, till the sense of death oppressed him, and then the shock sent him to the window to look for sky and stars.  Behind a low broad pine, hung with frosty mist, he heard a bell-wether of the flock in the silent fold.  Death in life it sounded.

The mother found him praying at the foot of Clare’s bed.  She knelt by his side, and they prayed, and their joint sobs shook their bodies, but neither of them shed many tears.  They held a dark unspoken secret in common.  They prayed God to forgive her.

Clare was buried in the family vault of the Todhunters.  Her mother breathed no wish to have her lying at Lobourne.

After the funeral, what they alone upon earth knew brought them together.