mine steadily, like
something on fire. And when, presently, I found he was not asleep, I
motioned to the night nurse.

"The change seemed to come suddenly; she went to find one of the
internes; I sat with my hand on his pulse.... There were three
physicians there.... Jack was not conscious after midnight."

Palla's lips and throat were dry and aching and her voice almost
inaudible:

"Darling," she whispered, "--darling--if I could give him back to you
and take his place!----"

Ilse smiled, but her heavy eyelids quivered:

"The scheme of things is so miserably patched together.... Except for
the indestructible divinity within each one of us, it all would be so
hopeless.... I had never been able to imagine Jack and Death
together--" She looked up at the clock. "He was alive only an hour
ago.... Isn't it strange--"

"Oh, Ilse, Ilse! I wish this God who deals out such wickedness and
misery had struck me down instead!"

Neither seemed to notice the agnostic paradox in this bitter cry wrung
from a young girl's grief.

Ilse closed her eyes as though to rest them, and sat so, her steady
hand on Palla's. And, so resting, said in her unfaltering voice:

"Jack, of course, lives.... But it seems a long time to wait to see
him."

"Jack lives," whispered Palla.

"Of course.... Only--it seems so long a time to wait.... I wanted to
show him--how kind love has been to us--how still more wonderful love
could have been to us ... for I could have borne him many children....
And now I shall bear but one."

After a silence, Palla lifted her eyes. In them the shadow of terror
still lingered; there was not an atom of colour in her face.

* * * * *

Ilse slept that night, though Palla scarcely closed her eyes. Dreadful
details of the coming day rose up to haunt her--all the ghastly
routine necessary before the dead lie finally undisturbed by the stir
and movement of many footsteps--the coming and going of the living.

* * * * *

Because what they called pneumonia was the Black Death of the ancient
East, they had warned Ilse to remain aloof from that inert thing that
had been her lover. So she did not look upon his face again.

There were relatives of sorts at the chapel. None spoke to her. The
sunshine on the flower-covered casket was almost spring like.

And in the cemetery, too, there was no snow; and, under the dead
grass, everywhere