Here and there, indeed, a woman, perhaps a stranger in the
country, remained upon her feet, noticeable among the many figures
seated in the pews. The Wanderer, familiar with many lands and many
varying traditions of worship, unconsciously noted these exceptions,
looking with a vague curiosity from one to the other. Then, all at once,
his tall frame shivered from head to foot, and his fingers convulsively
grasped the yielding sable on which they lay.
She was there, the woman he had sought so long, whose face he had not
found in the cities and dwellings of the living, neither her grave in
the silent communities of the dead. There, before the uncouth monument
of dark red marble beneath which Tycho Brahe rests in peace, there she
stood; not as he had seen her last on that day when his senses had left
him in the delirium of his sickness, not in the freshness of her bloom
and of her dark loveliness, but changed as he had dreamed in evil dreams
that death would have power to change her. The warm olive of her cheek
was turned to the hue of wax, the soft shadows beneath her velvet eyes
were deepened and hardened, her expression, once yielding and changing
under the breath of thought and feeling as a field of flowers when
the west wind blows, was now set, as though for ever, in a death-like
fixity. The delicate features were drawn and pinched, the nostrils
contracted, the colourless lips straightened out of the lines of beauty
into the mould of a lifeless mask.
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