ry one was
taken from the dead man on the bed and concentrated upon the woman.
Dr. Story, a nervous, intense, elderly man with a settled frown of
perplexity over keen eyes, which he had gotten from a struggle of
forty years with unanswerable problems of life and death, stepped
towards her hastily. Robert pressed close to her side. Ellen came
behind her, holding in a curious, instinctive fashion to a fold of
the older woman's gown, as if she had been a mother holding back a
child from a sudden topple to its hurt. Everybody expected her to
make some heart-breaking manifestation. She did nothing. At that
moment the sublime unselfishness of the woman, which was her one
strength of character, seemed actually to spread itself, as with
wings, before them all. She moved steadily, close to her husband on
the bed. She gazed at that profile of rigid calmness and enforced
peace, which, although the head lay low, seemed to have an effect of
upward motion, as if it were cleaving the mystery of space. Mrs.
Lloyd laid her hand upon her husband's forehead; she felt a slight
incredulousness of death, because it was still warm. She took his
hands, drew them softly together, and folded them upon his breast.
Then she turned and faced them all with an angelic expression.

"He did not realize it to suffer much?" she said.

"No, Mrs. Lloyd," replied Dr. Story, quickly. "No, I assure you that
he suffered very little."

"He seemed very happy when he died, Aunt Lizzie," said Robert,
huskily.

Mrs. Lloyd looked away from them all around the room. It was a
magnificent apartment. Norman Lloyd had had an artistic taste as
well as wealth. The furnishings had always been rather beyond Mrs.
Lloyd's appreciation, but she admired them kindly. She took in every
detail; the foam of rich curtains at the great windows, the
cut-glass and silver on the dressing-table, the pale softness of a
polar-bear skin beside the bed, the lifelike insistence of the
costly pictures on the walls.

"He's gone where it is a great deal more beautiful," she said to
them, like a child. "He's gone where there's better treasures than
these which he had here."

They all looked at her in amazement. It actually seemed as if, for
the moment, the woman's sole grief was over the loss to her husband
of those things which he had on earth--the treasures of his mortal
state.

Robert took hold of his aunt's arm and led her, quite unresisting,
from the room, and as she went she felt