The Argosy — page 315: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

298 Erna. face against the carven wall from which the stony-visaged saints frowned grimly down on our betrothal kiss. And I stretched out my hand and laid it lightly on hers, as it rested on a dark and mouldered thing, in which there yet lurked indistinct suggestions of the treachery of Judas. I felt the warm, soft hand tremble under mine, and struggle to escape me; and, tightening my clasp, there came next instant a frightened cry from Erna; then a rush into our faces of cold air, as, with a grating and sullen sound, the wall gave way an inch or two. And then, the spring refusing to act, closed heavily again, and left us stand- ing there, looking wildly into each other’s faces, alone with our wilder thoughts, and with the coming of the night. We buried the bones that were found in that ghastly hiding-place, when a way was at last broken into it, in the old vault of the Heath- cotts; and in the church beyond Erna stood with me next summer at the altar-rails, and exchanged with me the vows that made us man and wife. But when the time of roses came again, and a young life was born into our new home, far away from the Devon hills, her vow of obedience was, for the first time, broken. She insisted, in oppo- sition to my wish, on naming our first-born Geoffrey. And so Geoffrey, the stout cavalier of Marston and Worcester fights, sleeps his last sleep in the calm woods through which wind the clear waters of the Dart; and to the old manor-house, whose vanes rise glittering above those woods, come sometimes mother and child. And then, while the hot June sunlight pours through unglazed casement and shattered wall, and floods with its golden glory the place in which our ancestor’s bones were found, Geoffrey, his young namesake, peers fearfully into that narrow crypt, and listens while, with his mother’s hand clasped in his, the story of how that ancestor perished there is retold. SRI Le | ECOPMICLIOO KS, (E00)