there beside it on the table lay a letter in his own handwriting,—his letter from Palermo, with the money,—unopened. It had come too late; she had never once heard from him. And turning suddenly, he ran and knelt by the bed, flung his arms upon it, and burying his face, burst into such a passion of weeping as comes only once in a man's life.
When he came out of the house again he was no longer a boy. There was a hard look on his face: the features, always thin and delicate, had taken on a determined sharpness; out of the swarthy brown of his tan, the gray eyes looked startlingly and piercingly bright. In the carriage of his sinewy body there was far more of the soldier than the sailor.
In front of the Griswold house, at the nearest end of the village street, he met Heber,—an encounter which, if he had only known, was not strange, for the good creature had been watching at a window all the afternoon. In reply to his question, Heber took him along the road that led up the hill and into the little burying-ground, a rough clearing among the funereal pointed firs.
