Still, she did not suffer as much, for her mind had
overborne her body to such an extent that she had the mastery for
the time, to a certain extent, of those excruciating stabs of pain.
People looked at her incredulously. They could not believe that she
felt as she talked, that she was as happy and resigned as she
looked, but it was all true. It was either an abnormal state into
which her husband's death had thrown her, or one too normal to be
credited. She looked at it all with a supreme childishness and
simplicity. She simply believed that her husband was in heaven,
where she should join him; that he was beyond all suffering which
might have come to him through her, and all that troubled her was
the one consideration of his having been forced to leave his
treasures of earth. She looked at various things which had been
prized by the dead man, and found her chief comfort in saying to the
minister or Cynthia or Robert that Norman had loved these, but he
would have that which was infinitely more precious. She even gazed
out of the window, that Tuesday night, and saw her nephew driving
away with Ellen, and reflected, with pain, that her husband had been
fond and proud of that bay. She was a little at a loss to conceive
what could make up to her husband for that in another world, but she
succeeded, and evolved from her own loving fancy, and her
recollection of the Old Testament, a conception of some wonderful
creature, shod with thunder and maned with a whirlwind. Her disease,
and a drug she had been taking of late, stimulated her imagination
to results of grotesque pathos, but she was comforted.

That night when they were alone, Robert turned to the girl at his
side with a sudden motion. It was no time for love-making, for that
was in the mind of neither of them, but the bereavement of this
other woman, and the tragedy of her state, filled him with a sort of
protective pain towards the girl who might some time have to suffer
through him the same loss.

"Are you all tired out, dear?" he said, and passed his free arm
around her waist.

"No," replied Ellen. Then, since she was only a girl, and
overwrought, having been through a severe strain, she broke down,
and began to cry.

Robert drew her closer, and she hid her face on his shoulder. "Poor
little girl, it has been very hard for you," he whispered.

"Oh, don't think of me," sobbed Ellen. "But I can't bear it, the way
she acts and looks. It is sadder than grief."