ad become a point of pride
with him.

"Don't do it," he gasped. "I can't stand it, I really can't, I feel it
too much."

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave,
cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. "No,
I won't; I will save that for the night, when I have no better company.
Run over that theme at the beginning again, will you? It was running in
his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his
glass at the dinner-table. He had just begun to work it out when the late
autumn came on, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter. He lost
touch with his idea, I suppose, during his illness. Do you remember those
frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough
to save him from himself! When I got word from Florence that he had been
ill, I was singing at Monte Carlo. His wife was hurrying to him from
Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm.
They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the
library--a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture
and bronzes. He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room,
looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you
know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking-jacket
lent no colour to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill
he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the
last strokes to the score of his _'Souvenirs d' Automne,'_ and he was as
I most like to remember him; calm and happy, and tired with that heavenly
tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain
poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the garden
and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes
back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire. It
glowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorial
flame. Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. Adriance
sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes,
and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one
such life as his. Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into
the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both
of us at once--that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life
and death and God and hope--and we were like two