By the
long black hair it was a woman, and a young woman.
She had on what must once have been a most beautiful brown silk
dress, trimmed with quantities of fine lace, and looped up over a
stiff brocaded petticoat. Her skeleton feet were in the smallest of
low-cut shoes, the tarnished silver buckles of which were set with
rhinestones. Her head rested on her arm, outflung across the table.
The other arm hung limp, and the fingers pointed downward, as if
accusingly. She had quantities of glorious black hair, and this
alone had death respected; nothing else of her loveliness remained.
Under her fleshless hand lay the soiled and yellowed papers she had
written, and over which, in biting mockery, she had kept watch and
ward.
"Who is it? Oh, God, God!--who is it?" I gasped, and heard my voice
rattling in my throat like a dying woman's. As, perhaps her voice
had rattled, here in the dark. The thought of her, sitting here in
awful loneliness these long, long years, while life, all unknowing,
ebbed and flowed within reach of her, made me shudder.
"It is Jessamine Hynds, lost Jessamine Hynds," said her kinsman of
a later day, looking down upon the wreck of her with compassion.
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