Alas!  In this, then, was the story of the crimson roses!

It was far into the night when the last letter dropped to powder upon the table, and the old German, not pausing to undress, laid himself wearily down upon the little bed in the dark corner to take his rest.  The oil of the lamp was well-nigh spent then, and its languid flame quivered dimly upon the wan starved hands that were folded above the rusty coat, and on the noble face with its pale closed eyelids and patient lips, stedfast and calm as the face of a marble king.  Over his head the beautiful woman and her crimson flowers ever and anon brightened in the fitful leaping light, and shone like a beacon of lost hope upon a life that had been wrecked and cast adrift in a night of storm.  He died as he had lived, in silence; and his death was the sacrifice of a martyr, the fall of a warrior at his post.

Then the tempest broke over all the Piedmont lands, and the wind arose as a giant refreshed with his rest, and drove the dark thunder-clouds upward before the sounding pinions of his might like demon hounds upon the track of a flying world.  Then came the sharp swift hiss of the stinging hail and rain, and the baying of the hurricane, and the awful roll of the storm that shook the whole broad heaven from end to end.  Strange! that in the tumult of such a wild and terrible night as this, so gentle and so calm a soul should be destined to pass away!

Once again for a single instant I saw him, in the midst of a dazzling flash of lightning that showed me, clear and distinct as in a mirror, the whole of the silent chamber where the lamp had gone out, and the charred tinder of the burnt letters was scattered over the wooden table.

He lay motionless upon the white draped bed, a hero slain in the hour of his triumph, with broad chivalrous brows and tranquil lips, whence speech had fled for ever, grand and serene in the repose of a sleep that, like ’Lora’s, had borne him away into peace.

For him there was no longer storm, nor darkness, nor conflict.  He beheld his God face to face in the light of the Perfect Day.

Slowly at last, beyond the farthest bounds of the dull landscape, broke the white ghostly lines of dawn; and the shouting of the wind, and the rage of the chattering tempest fled down the watery sky with the flying scuds of cloud, away into the distant horizon of the west.  But the belladonna-plant lay dead on the stones of the balcony, torn and beaten by the hail and the wind, its trailing stem and clinging tendrils seared with the lightning, its purple blooms scattered among the shards of the broken flowerpot and the burnt tinder on the floor of the desolate studio.

High above the white front of the coming morning, the wind, returning into the bosom of God, bore upon its limitless wings a twofold burden, the spirit of a perished flower, the oblation of a Gentle Life.