smile of such transfigured radiance as sent a thrill of intense and
wistful longing through the hearts of those that looked on her.

The tragedy of Sophia Gregoriev was at an end; and none seeing her could
doubt that she had found in the Unknown Land ample reason and
compensation for her life on earth.

CHAPTER VI

NATHALIE

There is a certain maxim, unpleasant as it is prevalent, indulged in
with great frequency by a certain class of stoical sophists, to the
effect that there are many sorrows in life more difficult to bear than
that separation from our nearest brought by death. But those men--and
especially the women--who have experienced sorrow of both varieties, do
not use that proverb.

In his after life Ivan Gregoriev was called upon to bear many burdens of
grief; but none of them ever caused him to waver in the assurance that
the death of his mother had brought him the bitterest suffering he could
be called upon to endure. Before this time--for many recent weeks--he
had believed himself cognizant of most forms of unhappiness. So, in a
blind, insensate fashion, he was. But the night on which his mother left
him opened his eyes to that land of grief where consolation waits on
time; it shook from him the last vestige of morbidity; and, lastly, it
brought him, too, in generous measure, perception of those beauties of
thought and action to be gained by one who accepts his loss unselfishly,
in a true and humble spirit.

During the three days that passed before the funeral, Ivan, his brain
dulled and heavy with a kind of morbid despair, haunted the room where
his mother lay, surrounded with candles the lights of which illumined
and intensified the smile of transfiguration still remaining on her
peaceful face. To the boy, waiting and watching dumbly, it seemed
intolerable that the stillness of that sacred room should be disturbed
by the exits and entrances of strangers. In the beginning, he resented
even the arrival from her Petersburg convent of his cousin Nathalie; and
for the many members of the Blashkov family, distant relatives or mere
acquaintances, who throughout her life had left Sophia to bitter
loneliness, and came now to stare upon her empty frame, the son felt a
hatred too fierce to be expressed in words. They, however, neither knew
nor would have cared to learn how the boy heard their every word
concerning him and his with wrath unspeakable, and shuddered with misery
at their heartless insolenc