From mere tenderness of soul he would not forget one circumstance in all that; as a man might piously stamp on his memory the death-scene of a brother wrongfully condemned to die, against a time that may come.
[120] The fear of the corpse, which surprised him in his effort to watch by it through the darkness, was a hint of his own failing strength, just in time.

The first night after the washing of the body, he bore stoutly enough the tax which affection seemed to demand, throwing the incense from time to time on the little altar placed beside the bier.

It was the recurrence of the thing--that unchanged outline below the coverlet, amid a silence in which the faintest rustle seemed to speak--that finally overcame his determination.

Surely, here, in this alienation, this sense of distance between them, which had come over him before though in minor degree when the mind of Flavian had wandered in his sickness, was another of the pains of death.

Yet he was able to make all due preparations, and go through the ceremonies, shortened a little because of the infection, when, on a cloudless evening, the funeral procession went forth; himself, the flames of the pyre having done their work, carrying away the urn of the deceased, in the folds of his toga, to its last resting-place in the cemetery beside the highway, and so turning home to sleep in his own desolate lodging.
Quis desiderio sit pudor aut modus Tam cari capitis ?--+ What thought of others' thoughts about one could there be with the regret for "so dear a head" fresh at one's heart?
NOTES 116.