d! A doctor!"

One of the guests from nearby, who knew the neighborhood, had already
slipped from the door and gone to fetch the nearest doctor. The others
sat and listened for his step in breathless stillness.

Edgar Poe bent his marble face above the prostrate form of his wife,
calling to her in endearing whispers while, with his handkerchief he
wiped from her lips the oozing, crimson stream. His teeth chattered.
Once before he had seen such a stream. It was long ago--long ago, but he
remembered it well. He was back--a little boy, a mere baby--in the
small, dark room behind Mrs. Fipps' millinery shop, in Richmond, and a
stream like this came from the lips of his mother who lay so still, so
white, upon the bed. And his mother had been dying. He had seen her
thus--he would see her nevermore!... Would the doctor never come?--

* * * * *

Many days the Angel of Death spread his wings over the cottage in the
Valley of the Many-Colored Grass. Their shadow cast a great stillness
upon the cottage. Outside was a white, silent world. Snow had
fallen--snow on snow--until it lay deep, deep upon the garden-spot and
deep in the streets outside. There was no wind and the ice-sheathed
trees that were as sentinels round about the cottage stood still. They
seemed to listen and to wait.

Inside, in the bed-chamber upstairs, under the shelving walls of the low
Dutch roof, The Dreamer's heartsease blossom lay broken and wan upon the
white bed. It was a very white little blossom and the dark eyes seemed
darker, larger than ever before as they looked out from the pale face.
But they had never seemed so soft and a smile like an angel's played now
and again about her lips.

Beside her, with his lips pressed upon the tiny white hand which he held
in both his own was the bowed figure of a man--of a poet and a lover who
like the ice-sheathed trees seemed to listen and to wait--of a man whose
countenance from being pale was become ghastly, whose eyes from being
luminous were wild with a "divine despair."

At the foot of the bed sat a silver-haired woman with saintlike face
uplifted in resignation and aspiration. For once the busy hands were
idle and were clasped in her lap. She too, listened and waited, as she
had listened and waited for days. Oh Love! Oh Life! Are these the happy
trio who lived for each other only in the Valley of the Many-Colored
Grass?

The silence was only broken when the lips of the in