Waterbury evening Democrat., 1889-01-11
CHAPTER XXIII.
"GooD-BY, MY DEAR, GooD-BY."

hind him, and she was left alone.
 CHAPTER XXIII
 "GOoD-BY, MY DEAR, GooD-BY."
 When Edward Cossey had gone, Ida rose and put her hands to her head. So the blow had fallen, and the deed was done, and she was engaged to be married to Edward Cossey. And Harold Quaritch! We'll, there must be an end to that. It was hard, too-only a woman could know how hard. Ida was not a person with long record of love affairs. Once, when she was twenty, she had 8 pro posal which she had refused, and that was all. So it happened that when she became att tached to Col. Quaritch, she had found her heart for the first time and for Q woman, somewhat late in life. Consequently her feel ings were all the more profound, and so in- deed was her grief at being forced not only to put them away, but to give herself to an- other man who was not agreeable to her. She was not violent or i'll regulated woman like Mrs. Quest She looked facts in the face, re- cognized their meaning, and bowed before their memorable logic. It seemed to her almost impossible that she could hope to avoid this marriage, and if that proved to be so she might be relied upon to make the best of it. Scandal would, under any circumstances, never find word to say against Ida, for she was not person who would attempt to con- sole herself for an unhappy marriage But it was bitter, bitter as gall, to be thus forced to turn aside from her happiness-for she we'll knew that with Harold Quaritch her life would be very happy-and fit her shoulders to this heavy yoke. Well, she had saved the place to her father by it, and also to her descendants if she had any, and that was all that could be said forit.
 She thought and thought, wishing in the .-1Q l~- Al~ ~l.- been born to come to such heavy day, till at last she could think no more. The air of the room seemed to stife her, though it was by no means overloaded. She. went to the window and looked out. It was Q wild, wet evening, and the wind was driving the rain before it ill sheets. In the west the lurid light of the sinking sun stained the clouds blood red, and broke in arrows of ominous light upon the driving storm.
 But, bad the weather was, it attracted Ida. When the heart is heavy and torn by conflicting passions, it seems to answer to the calling of the storm and to long to lose it's petty troubling ill the turmoil of the rushing world. Nature has many moods of which our own are but the echo and reflection, and she can be companionable when all human sympathy must fail. For she is our mother from whom we come, to whom go, and her arms are ever open to clasp the children who can hear her voices. Drawn thereto by an impulse which she could not have ana lyzed, Ida went upstairs, put on thick pair of boots, a mackintosh and an old hat, and salled out into the wind and wet It was blowing big guns, and as the rain whirled down, the drops struck upon her face like spray. She crossed the bridge and went out into the park land beyond. The air was full of dead leaves, and the grass rustled with them, for this was the first wind since the frost. The great boughs of the oaks rattled and groaned above her, and high overhead, among the sullen clouds, flight of wind tossed rocks were being blown this way and that.
 Ida bent her tall frame against the rain and gale, and fought her way through it. At first she had no clear idea as to where she was going, but gradually, perhaps from custom, she took the path that ran across the fields to Honham church. It was beautiful old church, and had originally been founded by the Boissey family, and enlarged (particu- larly as regards the tower, which had been partially blown down and rebuilt about the time of Charles I, and was one of the finest in the country) by the widow of one of the De la Molles, whose husband had fallen at Agincourt, as a memorial forever, There, upon the porch, were carved the "hawks" of the De la Molles, wreathed round with palms
 
 hung the warriors helmet and his dinted shield.
 Nor was he alone, for all around lay the dust of the illustrious dead, come after the toll and struggle of their stormy lives to rest within the walls of that old church. Some of them had monuments of alabaster, where they lay in effigy, their heads pi!lowed upon that of a conquered Saracen; some had monuments of oak and brass, and some had no monuments 1N-- destroyed them. But they were nearly all there, some twenty generations of the bearers of an ancient name, for even those of them who had perished on the scaffold had been borne here for burial. The whole place was eloquent of the dead and of the mournful les- son of mortality. From century to century the bearers of that name had walked in these fields, and lived in yonder castle, and looked upon the familiar swell of yonder ground and the silver flash of wonder river, and now their dust was gathered here, and all the forgotten turmoil of their lives was lost in the silence of their narrow tomb.
 Ida loved the spot, hallowed to her not only by the altar of her faith, but also by the human associations that clung round and clothed it as the ivy clothed its walls Here she had been christened, and here among her ancestors she hoped to be buried also. Here as a girl she used, with her brother James, to creep ill awed silence and look through the window when the full moon was up, at the white figures stretched in their silence within Here, too, she had sat for Sunday after Sun- day for more then twenty years, and stared at the quaint Latin inscriptions cut on mar ble slabs which recorded the almost super- human virtues of departed De la Molles of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, her own immediate ancestors. The place was -------