clad wall of the town. Above the flowers rose the monuments of the dead, little marble temples, white figures of angels, and big, heavy slabs of stone. Moss grew on them and on the trunks of the cypresses. Here and there a white or red flower still clung to the camelia trees, but most of them lay brown and faded on the black earth, exhaling raw, damp fumes. He remembered something he had read: the Japanese did not like camelias because they fell off whole and fresh like heads chopped off.
Jenny Winge lay buried at the farthest end of the cemetery near the chapel on a grassy slope, covered with daisies. There were only a few graves. On the border of the slope cypresses had been planted, but they were still very small, like toy trees with their pointed green tops on straight brown trunks, reminding one of the pillars in a cloister arcade. Her grave was a little way from the others; it was only a pale grey mound of earth, the grass round it having been trodden down when it was being dug. The sun shone on it and the dark cypresses formed a wall behind it.
Covering his face with his hands, Gunnar bent on his knees until his head rested on the faded wreaths.
The weariness of spring weighted his limbs, the blood flowed aching with sorrow and regret at every beat of his heavy heart.
Jenny—Jenny—Jenny—he heard her pretty name in every trill of the birds—and she was dead.
Lying far down in the dark. He had cut off a curl from her fair hair and carried it in his pocket-book. He took it out and held it in the sunshine—those poor little filmy threads were the only part of her luxurious, glossy hair the sun could reach and warm.
She was dead and gone. There were some pictures of hers … there had been a short notice about her in the papers. And the mother and sisters mourned her at home, but the real Jenny they had never known, and they knew nothing about her
