Somehow that picture of
Heda has always remained fixed in my mind. Sorrow becomes some
women and she was one of them. Her beautiful dark grey eyes did
not grow red with weeping; the tears just welled up in them and
fell like dewdrops from the heart of a flower.
She sat very upright and very still, as he did, looking straight
in front of her, while a ray of sunshine, falling on her head,
showed the chestnut-hued lights in her waving hair, of which she
had a great abundance.
Indeed the pair of them, thus seated side by side, reminded me of
an engraving I had seen somewhere of the statues of a husband and
wife in an old Egyptian tomb. With just such a look did the
woman of thousands of years ago sit gazing in patient hope into
the darkness of the future. Death had made her sad, but it was
gone by, and the little wistful smile about her lips seemed to
suggest that in this darkness her sorrowful eyes already saw the
stirring of the new life to be. Moreover, was not the man she
loved the companion of her hopes as he had been of her woes.
Such was the fanciful thought that sprang up in my mind, even in
the midst of those great anxieties, like a single flower in a
stony wilderness of thorns or one star on the blackness of the
night.
In a moment it had gone and I was telling them of what I had
learned. They listened till I had finished. Then Anscombe said
slowly--
"Two of us can't hold this house against an impi.
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