Drawing from her finger the emerald which had occasioned so many disquieting reflections, Edna continued: 

“You must allow me to return the ring, which I have hitherto worn as a token of friendship, and which I cannot consent to retain any longer.  ‘Peace be with you,’ dear friend, is the earnest prayer of my heart.  Our paths in life will soon diverge so widely that we shall probably see each other rarely; but none of your friends will rejoice more sincerely than I to hear of your happiness and prosperity, for no one else has such cause to hold you in grateful remembrance.  Good-bye, Mr. Leigh.  Think of me hereafter only as a friend.”

She gave him both hands for a minute, left the ring in his palm, and, with tears in her eyes, went back to the tables and platforms.

Very rapidly chattering groups of happy children collected in the grove; red-cheeked boys clad in white linen suits, with new straw hats belted with black, and fair-browed girls robed in spotless muslin, garlanded with flowers, and bright with rosy badges.  Sparkling eyes, laughing lips, sweet, mirthful, eager voices, and shadowless hearts.  Ah! that Mayday could stretch from the fairy tropic-land of childhood to the Arctic zone of age, where snows fall chilling and desolate, drifting over the dead but unburied hopes which the great stream of time bears and buffets on its broad, swift surface.

The celebration was a complete success; even awkward Jamie acquitted himself with more ease and grace than his friends had dared to hope.  Speeches and songs were warmly applauded, proud parents watched their merry darlings with eyes that brimmed with tenderness; and the heart of Semiramis never throbbed more triumphantly than that of the delighted young Queen of May, who would not have exchanged her floral crown for all the jewels that glittered in the diadem of the Assyrian sovereign.

Late in the evening of that festal day Mr. Hammond sat alone on the portico of the old-fashioned parsonage.  The full moon, rising over the arched windows of the neighboring church, shone on the marble monuments that marked the rows of graves; and the golden beams stealing through the thick vines which clustered around the wooden columns, broidered in glittering arabesque the polished floor at the old man’s feet.

That solemn, mysterious silence which nature reverently folds like a velvet pall over the bier of the pale, dead day, when the sky is

“Filling more and more with crystal light, As pensive evening deepens into night,”

was now hushing the hum and stir of the village; and only the occasional far-off bark of a dog, and the clear, sweet vesper-song of a mocking-bird singing in the myrtle tree, broke the repose so soothing after the bustle of the day.  To labor and to pray from dawn till dusk is the sole legacy which sin-stained man brought through the flaming gate of Eden, and, in the gray gloaming, mother Earth stretches her vast hands tenderly over her drooping, toil-spent children, and mercifully murmurs nunc dimillis.