An awful solitude seemed to encompass me--a silence of my own creating.

I fancied that even the angry elements avoided me as I passed; that there was nothing, nothing in all the wide universe but myself and a dark brooding horror called Vengeance.

All suddenly, the mists of my mind cleared; I moved no longer in a deaf, blind stupor.

A flash of lightning danced vividly before my eyes, followed by a crashing peal of thunder, I saw to what end of a wild journey I had come! Those heavy gates--that undefined stretch of land--those ghostly glimmers of motionless white like spectral mile-stones emerging from the gloom--I knew it all too well--it was the cemetery! I looked through the iron palisades with the feverish interest of one who watches the stage curtain rise on the last scene of a tragedy.

The lightning sprung once more across the sky, and showed me for a brief second the distant marble outline of the Romani vault.
There the drama began--where would it end?
Slowly, slowly there flitted into my thoughts the face of my lost child--the young, serious face as it had looked when the calm, preternaturally wise smile of Death had rested upon it; and then a curious feeling of pity possessed me--pity that her little body should be lying stiffly out there, not in the vault, but under the wet sod, in such a relentless storm of rain.