this other woman, half revealed to me in the tumult of
sorrow, and my eyes cannot come out of her.

Madame Piot has changed the candles and attached a band to support the
dead woman's chin. Framed in this napkin, which is knotted over the
skull in her woolly gray hair, the face looks like a hook-nosed mask of
green bronze, with a vitrified line of eyes; the knees make two sharp
summits under the sheet; one's eyes run along the thin rods of the
shins and the feet lift the linen like two in-driven nails.

Slowly Marie prepares to go. She has closed the neck of her dress and
hidden herself in her cloak. She comes up to me, sore-hearted, and
with her tears for a moment quenched she smiles at me without speaking.
I half rise, my hands tremble towards her smile as if to touch it,
above the past and the dust of my second mother.

Towards the end of the night, when the dead fire is scattering
chilliness, the women go away one by one. One hour, two hours, I
remain alone. I pace the room in one direction and another, then I
look, and shiver. My aunt is no more. There is only left of her
something indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her place
is desolate. Now, close to her, I am alone! Alone--magnified by my
affliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness of
the things now beginning. At last the window grows pale, the ceiling
turns gray, and the candle-flames wink in the first traces of light.

I shiver without end. In the depth of my dawn, in the heart of this
room where I have always been, I recall the image of a woman who filled
it--a woman standing at the chimney-corner, where a gladsome fire
flames, and she is garbed in reflected purple, her corsage scarlet, her
face golden, as she holds to the glow those hands transparent and
beautiful as flames. In the darkness, from my vigil, I look at her.

* * * * * *

The two nights which followed were spent in mournful motionlessness at
the back of that room where the trembling host of lights seemed to give
animation to dead things. During the two days various activities
brought me distraction, at first distressing, then depressing.

The last night I opened my aunt's jewel box. It was called "the little
box." It was on the dressing table, at the bottom of piled-up litter.
I found some topaz ear-rings of a bygone period, a gold cross, equally
outdistanced, small and slender--a little girl's, or