Crawford avalanche. (Grayling, Mich.) 1879-19??, 1897-05-20

tory, that he failed to answer her with
smile or kind word. Is It not SO with al
of us? Do we not have haunted rooms In
our hearts, in which we retire for anguished
hours, and neglect those who are dearest
to us now and love MS best, while we and
memory converse with the dead?
But Calvert was not always alone with the
dead.
1t is an awful thing to have our love die
In our arms. One moment we clasp her
crowned with tho richest, deepest treasures
of our devotion. She is the light of our
life. Her beauty delights and charms MS,
her laughter is to us the sweetest music.
The next moment she lies dead in our
heart, and our arms still clasp her. Not In
deaths pale, cold insensibility, but dead
nevertheless. Dead with a smile on her
lips; dead with the heavenly light in her
eyes which now seems but a reflection Of
baleful glare from Hades; dead with all
the blush and bloom upon her cheeks. A
colder, crueler death, this, than the grave
has ever known, for the grave covers up all
faults, and memory cherishes only kind
nesses and lovable traits. Love never lies
in the grave. but in every heart love lies
buried--and now our love lies dead. Dead
in our hearts where her pale ghost must ever
haunt and torture us while her fair, white
arms cling about us. Her warm heart,
throbbing as you SO fondly and foelishly
imagined for you alone, still beats against
your own, but she is dead to You. The
past you two have spent together suddenly
becomes in memory a lonely graveyard
through which in the future will ever fit
ghosts Of the joys and pleasures of the
vanished days when love and trust-vain
love, betrayed trust, now you know-made
life SO sweet and love so fair. All this you
know while you hold in your arms the love
just dead. AS the Indian bows blindly
before hideous image Of his own creation
while worshiping a fair goddess lodged
in his brain, so you, all these years, have
seen with the eyes of blinded alteration an
angel in your weak, unworthy love, who is
now dead in your heart, but who must ever
come between you and the noble ideal her
untruth has destroyed.
So it was with Louis Calvert.
The first young wife of long ago had
been given all the real, pure, true love his
heart had ever known, and she had priced
it not. Weak and vain, and easily infu-
enced, another had caused her to break her
marriage VOWS, and her husband had slain
her. Just as the marble beauty stood with
extended arms, smiling lips, and laugh
ing eyes, that first young wife had stood on
long gone morning, before her lover,
but not her husband, saying: Some"
The young Doctors vengeance had been
terrible. The man who had robbed him
had met death mysteriously-only the Doc
tor ever knew how. The young wife had
faded away silently from the earth. But
every day the Doctor stood before
the petried image, in that darkened,
mysterious studio, and his re-
venge continued. And when all alone
he Amounted those marble limbs with a
strange elixir, and the blood again coursed
swiftly through the false wife's veins, the
smiling lips parted in perfect speech, the
bright eyes sparkled; and the extended
arms eagerly beckoned him to "Come."
But he would never allow them to clasp
him.
Never for long time. But the heart is
not always stone; revenge is satiated at
last, and one morning the Doctor, forget
ting his later love, forgetting all save the
memory of his first boyish passion, rushed
into the marble beauty's embrace, and the
soft, fair arms closed upon him, the smiling
lips caressed his own, and the laughing
L.
dropped from him; he was again the young
and ardent lover as when he had last felt
those arms around him. Then the power
of the life-restoring elixir faded, and the
marble beauty became marble again.
So his wife and the village gossip found
him many hours later, tightly clasped in
those marble arms, crushed and lifeless,
but with a smile upon his lips.