In the morning Albinia came forth like one who had been knocked down and shattered, weary and gentle, and with the tears ever welling into her eyes, above all when she endeavoured to write to Sophy; and she showed her ordinary earnestness only when she entreated to see her boy once more.  Her husband took her to look on the countenance settled into the expression of unearthly peace, but she was not satisfied; it was not her own Gilbert, boyish, sensitive, dependent, and shrinking.  The pale brow, the marked manly features, the lower ones concealed by the brown moustache, belonged to the hero who had dared the deadly ride and borne his friend through the storm of shot and shell; the noble, settled, steadfast face was the face of a stranger, and gave her a thrill of disappointment.  She gloried in the later Gilbert, but the last she had seen of him whom she loved for his weakness, had been when she had not heeded his farewell.

It made the pang the less when evening came and he was carried to his resting-place.  They would have persuaded Frederick to spare himself, but as the only officer of the same corps, as well as for the sake of many closer ties, he would not hear of being absent, and made his cousin Maurice do his best to restore the smart soldierly air which he for the first time thought of regretting.

Gilbert’s horse had perished at Balaklava, but his cap, sword, and spurs, were laid on the coffin, and from her shaded window Albinia watched it borne between the files of soldiers with arms reversed; and the procession of officers whose bright array contrasted with the colonel’s war-worn dress, ghastly cheek, and empty sleeve, tokens of the reality of war amid its pageantry, as all moved slowly away to the deep tones of the solemn Dead March, music well befitting the calm grandeur of the face she had seen, and leaving her heart throbbing with the deep exulting awe and pathos of a soldier’s funeral.  She knelt alone, and followed the burial service in the stillness of the room overlooking the broad expanse of blue sea and sky; and by-and-by, through the window came the sound of the volley fired over the grave, the farewell of the army to the soldier at rest, his battles ended.

’There was peace, and there was glory; but she could not divest herself of a sense of unreality.  She could not feel as if it were really and truly Gilbert, and she were mourning for him.  All was like a dream—­that solemn military spectacle—­the serene, grave sunshine on the fortress-harbour stretching its mailed arms into the sea—­the roofs of the knightly old monastic city rising in steps from the bay crowded with white sails—­and even those around her were different, her husband pale and still, as in a region above common life, and her cousin like another man, without his characteristic joyousness and insouciance.  She could hardly induce herself, in her drowsy state, to believe that all was indeed veritable and tangible.