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When he finished this he turned and read again: “Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept,” etc. They were the Psalm and the chapter which I had heard him read to Elsket that first day when she became excited, and with which he had so often charmed her restless spirit.

He closed, and I thought he was done, but he opened his hymn-book and turning over a few leaves sang the same hymn he had sung to her that day. He sang it all through to the end, the low, strange, dirge-like hymn, and chanted as it was by that old man alone, standing in the fading evening light beside the grave which he had dug for his daughter, the last of his race, I never heard anything so moving. Then he knelt, and clasping his hands offered a prayer. The words, from habit, ran almost as they had done when he had prayed for Elsket before, that God would be her Shepherd, her “Herder,” and lead her beside the still waters, and give her peace.

When he was through I waited a little, and then I took up a spade to help him; but he reached out and took it quietly, and seeing that he wanted to be alone I left him. He meant to do for Elsket all the last sacred offices himself.

I was so fatigued that on reaching the house I dropped off to sleep and slept till morning, and I do not know when he came into the house, if he came at all. When I waked early next morning he was not there, and I rose and went up to the church to hunt for him. He was sitting quietly beside the grave, and I saw that he had placed at her head a little cross of birchwood, on which he had burned one word, simply,

“Elsket.”

I spoke to him, asking him to come to the house.

“I cannot leave her,” he said; but when I urged him he rose silently and returned with me.

I remained with him for a while after that, and each day he went and sat by the grave. At last I had to leave. I urged him to come with me, but he replied always, “No, I must watch over Elsket.”

It was late in the evening when we set off to cross the mountain. We came by the same path by which I had gone, Olaf leading me as carefully and holding me as steadily as when I went over before. I stopped at the church to lay a few wild flowers on the little gray mound where Elsket slept so quietly. Olaf said not a word; he simply waited till I was done and then followed me dumbly. I was so filled with sorrow for him that I did not, except in one place, think much of the fearful cliffs along which we made our way. At the Devil’s Seat, indeed, my nerves for a moment seemed shaken and almost gave way as I thought of the false young lord whose faithlessness had caused all the misery to these simple, kindly folk, and of the fierce young Norseman who had there found so sweet a revenge. But we came on and passed the ledge, and descending struck the broader path just after the day broke, where it was no longer perilous but only painful.

There Olaf paused. “I will go back if you don’t want me,” he said. I did not need his services, but I urged him to come on with me–to pay a visit to his friends. “I have none,” he said, simply. Then to come home with me and live with me in old Virginia. He said, “No,” he “must watch over Elsket.” So finally I had to give in, and with a clasp of the hand and a message to “her friend” Doctor John, to “remember Elsket,” he went back and was soon lost amid the rocks.

I was half-way down when I reached a cleared place an hour or so later, and turned to look back. The sharp angle of the Devil’s Ledge was the highest point visible, the very pinnacle of the mountain, and there, clear against the burnished steel of the morning sky, on the very edge, clear in the rare atmosphere was a small figure. It stood for a second, a black point distinctly outlined, and then disappeared.

It was Olaf of the Mountain, gone back to keep watch over Elsket.