though they were cut in marble effigy on a tomb of youthful dissolution.
He followed the impress of an arm to the hand; and, leaning forward,
touched it. A coldness seemed to come through the cover to his fingers.
He let his hand stay upon hers--perhaps the warmth would flow back into
the cold arm, the chill heart; perhaps he could give her some of his
vitality. The possibility afforded him a meager comfort, instilled a faint
glow into his benumbed being. His hand closed upon that covered by the
linen like a shroud. He sat rigid, concentrated, in his effort, his
purpose. The light flickered again from the fiery perishing of a second
moth.

A strange feeling crept over him, a deepened sense of suspense, of
imminence. He fingered his throat, and his hand was icy where it touched
his burning face. He stood up in an increasing, nameless disturbance.

A faint spasm crossed the drained countenance beneath him; the mouth fell
open.

He knew suddenly that Lettice was dead.

There her clothes lay strewn on the chair and floor, the long, black
stockings and the rumpled chemise strung with narrow blue ribband. She had
worn them on her warm, young body; she had tied the ribband in the morning
and untied it at night, untied it at night ... it was night now.

A slow, exhausted deliberation of mind and act took the place of his late
panic. He smoothed the sheet where he had grasped her hand in the futile
endeavor to instil into her some of his warmth. He gazed at her for a
moment, at the shadows like pools of ink poured into the caverns of her
eyes, at a glint of teeth no whiter than the rest, at the dark plait of
her hair lying sinuously over the pillow. Then he went to the door:

"Mrs. Caley," he pronounced. The woman appeared in the doorway from the
kitchen. "Mrs. Caley," he repeated, "Lettice is dead."

She started forward with a convulsive gasp, and he turned aside and walked
heavily out onto the porch. He stood for a moment gazing absently into the
darkened valley, at the few lights of Greenstream village, the stars like
clusters of silver grapes on high, ultra-blue arbors. The whippoorwills
throbbed from beyond the stream, the stream itself whispered in a
pervasive monotone. The first George Gordon Makimmon, resting on the porch
of his new house isolated in the alien wild, had heard the whippoorwills
and the stream. Gordon's father had heard them just as he, the present
Makimmon, heard them sounding in the night. But no o