Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/1014

942 less, and for some time they sat in silence, yielding to the tranquil loveliness of the scene and to that inner experience of the soul brooding over each, and more inscrutable than the fathomless vault above them.

"I suppose we shall never get used to a midnight that is still and at the same time lustrous, as this is to-night," Wayland said. "The sense of its uniqueness is as fresh whenever it is spread before us as if we had never seen it before."

It was but a part of what he meant. He was thinking how sorrow, the wide sense of personal loss, was in some way like the pervasiveness, the voiceless speech, of this shadowed radiance around them.

He drew a little nearer the relaxed and slender figure beside his own. "It is of her you are thinking, Lindsay," he said, gently, and mentioning for the first time the young man's loss. "All that you see seems saturated with her memory. I think it will always be so—scenes of exceptional beauty, moments of high emotion, will always bring her back."

The boy's response came with difficulty: "Perhaps so. I do not know. I think the thought of her is always with me."

"If so, it should be for strength, for comfort," his friend pleaded. "She herself brought only gladness wherever she came."

There was something unusual in his voice, something that for a moment raised a vague questioning in Lindsay's mind; but absorbed as he was in his own sadness, it eluded his feeble inquiry. To what Wayland had said he could make no reply.

"Perhaps it is the apparent waste of a life so beautiful that seems to you so intolerable—" He felt the strong man's impulse to arrest an irrational grief, and groped for the assurance he desired. "Yet, Lindsay, we know things are not wasted; not in the natural world, not in the world of the spirit." But on the last words his voice lapsed miserably, and he half rose to go.

Lindsay caught his arm and drew him back. "Don't go yet," he said, brokenly. "I know you think it would help me if I would talk about—Stella; if I should tell it all out to you. I thank you for being willing to listen. Perhaps it will help me."

He paused, seeking for some words in which to express the sense of poverty which scourged him. Of all who had loved his sister, he himself was left poorest! Others had taken freely of her friendship, had delighted themselves in her face, her words, her smile, had all these things for memories. He had been separated from her, in part by the hard conditions of their youth, and at the last, when they had been together, by his own will. Oh, what had been her inner life during these last two years, when it had gone on beside his own, while he was too busy to attend?

But the self-reproach was too bitter for utterance to even the kindest of friends. "I thought I could tell you," he said at last, "but I can't. Oh, Professor Wayland," he cried, "there is an element in my grief that is peculiar to itself, that no one else in sorrow ever had!"

"I think every mourner on earth would say that, Lindsay." Again the younger man discerned the approach of a mystery, but again he left it unchallenged, and it passed from his thought.

The professor rose to his feet. "Good night," he said; "unless you will go back with me. Even with such moonlight as this, one must sleep." He had dropped to that kind level of the commonplace by which we spare ourselves and one another.

The boy's voice ringing out blithely through the drip and dampness of the winter evening marked his winding route across the college grounds. Lindsay Cowart, busy at his study table, listened without definite effort and placed the singer as the lad newly come from the country. He could have identified any other of the Vaucluse students by connections as slight—Marchman by his whistling, tender, elusive sounds, flute notes sublimated, heard only when the night was late and the campus still; others by tricks of voice, fragments of laughter, by their footfalls, even, on the narrow brick walk below his study window. Such the easy proficiency of affection.

Attention to the lad's singing suddenly was lifted above the subconscious. The simple melody had entangled itself in