And his last glimpse of her face had revealed those things gone, and in their place the strange joy she had run into the tent to hide.

That she should rejoice over the dead, or that the grim relics from the grave should bring that new dawn into her face and eyes, did not strike him as shocking.

In Joanne his sun had already begun to rise and set.

He had come to understand that for her the grave must hold its dead; that the fact of death, death under the slab that bore Mortimer FitzHugh's name, meant life for her, just as it meant life and all things for him.

He had prayed for it, even while he dreaded that it might not be.