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Updated: June 19, 2025
On the day that had been fixed the mourners walked slowly toward the churchyard, Father Heilman in front carrying a crucifix. Then slowly a figure clad in snow-white garments, and wringing her hands in great sorrow, came to join the mourners, who all wore black clothes as a sign of their grief. Those who noticed the white-veiled figure drew closer together, terror-stricken.
At one time was a march, at another a quick tune; which ceasing, the old nuns began again, and so sung until the service was ended. In the midst of it one of the white-veiled sisters approached us with a very mysterious air, and put down her white veil close to our ears and whispered. Were we doing anything wrong, I wondered?
Within, as we looked over the shoulders of the townspeople who, like us, had come to see what the bells meant by their ringing, within the church there was a rich and sombre dusk; out of this dusk, indistinctly at first, lit by the tremulous flicker of a myriad of candles, came a line of white-veiled heads; then another of young boys, with faces as pale as the nosegays adorning their brand-new black coats; next the scarlet-robed choristers, singing, and behind them still others swinging incense that thickened the dusk.
For a full half hour those pale lambent figures were moving ghost-like about the church, while the white-veiled throng before the altar gradually diminished until at last it disappeared: fading from sight a little at a time, softly as dream-visions of things beautiful melt away.
He read on, heart and soul and mind absorbed in the marvels of the eastern skald; the stories told in the streets of Cairo, amidst gorgeous costumes, and camels, and white-veiled women, vibrating here in the heart of a Scotch boy, in the darkest corner of a mud cottage, at the foot of a hill of cold-loving pines, with a barefooted girl and a baby for his companions.
For now every available inch of space was occupied, as far as eye could see there were rows upon rows of men and white-veiled women, . . Theos imagined there must have been more then five thousand people present.
He sought the halls of old AEgir, the Ocean-king; but he wist not which way to go, whether across the North Sea towards Isenland, or whether along the narrow channel between Britain-land and the main. While he paused, uncertain where to turn, he saw the pale-haired daughters of old AEgir, the white-veiled Waves, playing in the moonlight near the shore. Of them he asked the way to AEgir's hall.
At that moment Father Heilman began to pray, and all the mourners knelt around the grave, in which the coffin bearing the shield and helmet of the knight had now been placed. When the prayer was ended the company arose, but the white-veiled figure was no longer to be seen. Only on the spot where she had knelt a stream of crystal water gushed out of the earth.
And as for life's emotions, the frail, frivolous, ephemeral fury of these white-winged ghosts of daylight, embattled and all tremulous with passion, seemed exquisitely amazing to her here between the chaste and icy immobility of white-veiled peaks and the terrific twilight of the world's depths below. McKay, studying the papers, glanced up at Miss Erith.
Her vivid imagination went beyond the little work-room with its white-veiled women to those hospitals back of the battle line where mutilated men lay waiting for the compresses and the wipes and the bandages, men in awful agony .
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