Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/69

 curls, while nurse went down on her knees to pray.

"And at sundown you walk out into your garden along the very path that brought you both home yesterday, but you walk like a man in a dream, for ringing in your ears is the wail that was heard of old in Ramah, and you know your darling is with the angels, wondering feebly why that knowledge cannot console you more.

"Or perhaps your Grourd was 'only a woman's love!'—not a growth, certainly, however exuberant, on which a wise man should place so much dependence as on lignum vitæ, for instance, or heart-of-oak. But, so far as I can see, either wise men do not fall in love, or they allow wisdom to slip out of their grasp in the very act of making that fatal stumble. So, in defiance of all theory, warning, and practical experience, you may have congratulated yourself with