Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/358

 be secured to conduct the obsequies for Genevra Whitcomb. So Frederic Homer Balch preached the funeral sermon for the girl he knew now and would forever know that he loved—who had returned his love and had gone from him in estrangement into the final silence. He completed the service, and no one suspected the anguish with which he did it. The following weeks were among the darkest of his life and he almost lost faith in the religion to which he had given himself with so much consecration. He kept a little spray of artificial lilies from the only floral offerings obtainable during that frozen period. He afterwards wrote:

"When the lid of the coffin was removed, and I looked upon her dead face with the little heap of salt on the still lips, it all came back, and I knew that I was looking for the last time upon the face of the only girl I would ever love."

To her he dedicated Genevieve: A Tale of Oregon.

In memory of one, now dead, whose name gives the book its title and whose character is portrayed in its pages, this tale has been written, and to her it is reverently dedicated.

He later met a Scotch girl while a theological student at Oakland, California, a girl also beautiful and of provocative wit, a girl who told her confidences to him, "who told him everything," but he wrote his sister:

"After all these years the girl who died at Lyle is more to me than any girl or woman living. If I ever marry anyone it will have to be, I am afraid, a marriage without love, which is not supposed to be desirable."

He was never married. A smooth, broad highway now goes through Lyle; in the little cemetery there you will find the grave of Genevra Whitcomb and the grave of Frederic Homer Balch.