lief than of temper. Of course. Gabrielle Delzant was
one of the elect, and filled with grace. And she had as little sense of
tragedy as St. Francis or his skylarks; sympathy meaning for her less
the fact of feeling the sufferings of others, than that of healing, of
consoling, and of compensating.

With this went naturally that, in a very busy life, full--over-full,
some of us thought--of the affairs of other folk, she never appeared
worried or hurried. Of the numberless persons who carried their business
to her, or whose secret troubles became manifest to her dear
bluish-brown eyes, each must have felt as if she existed for him or her
solely. And folk went to her as they go into a church of her religion,
not merely for spiritual aid, but for the comfort of space and rest in
this world of crowding and bustle; for the sense of a piece of heaven
closed in for one's need and all one's very own. Dear Madame Blanc, how
many shy shadows do we not seem to see around us since her death; or
rather to guess at, roaming disconsolate, lacking they scarce know what,
that ever-welcoming sanctuary of her soul!

I have compared it with a church; but outwardly, and just because she
was such a believer in life, it was more like a dwelling-place, like
those brown corridors, full of books, at Parays; or that bedroom of
hers, with the high lights all over the polished floor, and its look of
a library. To me Gabrielle Delzant revealed the reality of what I had
long guessed and longed for aimlessly, the care and grace of art, the
consecration of religion, applied to the matters of every day. It hung
together with her worship of life, with her belief, as she expressed it
to you, all those years ago, _that life must be begun many times anew_.
And it is this which, for all the appalling unexpectedness, the dreadful
cataclysm of her temporal ending, has made the death of Gabrielle
Delzant so strangely difficult, for me, at least, to realise as death at
all.

Not death, but only absence; and that, how partial!

It is eight months and more, dear Madame Blanc, since she and I bade
each other adieu in the body. She had been some while ill, though none
of us suspected how fatally. It was the eve of her departure for Paris;
and I was returning to Italy. She was grieved at parting from me, at
leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half
suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a
November day, diss