w she lived on
for his recovery. But, as I have said, she changed, as all things
mortal change; all but the earth and the ice-stream and the stars
above it. She read much, and her mind grew deep and broad, none the
less gentle with it all; she was wiser in the world; she knew the
depths of human hope and sorrow. You remember her only as an old lady
whom we loved. Only her heart did not change--I forgot that; her
heart, and the memory of that last loving smile upon his face, as he
bent down to look into her eyes, before he slipped and fell. She lived
on, and waited for his body, as possibly his other self--who
knows?--waited for hers. As she grew older she grew taller; her eyes
were quieter, her hair a little straighter, darker than of yore; her
face changed, only the expression remained the same. Mary Knollys!

Human lives rarely look more than a year, or five, ahead; Mary Knollys
looked five and forty. Many of us wait, and grow weary in waiting, for
those few years alone, and for some living friend. Mary Knollys waited
five and forty years--for the dead. Still, after that first year, she
never wore all black; only silvery grays, and white with a black
ribbon or two. I have said that she almost seemed to think her husband
living. She would fancy his doing this and that with her; how he would
joy in this good fortune, or share her sorrows--which were few,
mercifully. His memory seemed to be a living thing to her, to go
through life with her, hand in hand; it changed as she grew old; it
altered itself to suit her changing thought; until the very memory of
her memory seemed to make it sure that he had really been alive with
her, really shared her happiness or sorrow, in the far-off days of her
earliest widowhood. It hardly seemed that he had been gone already
then--she remembered him so well. She could not think that he had
never been with her in their little cottage. And now, at sixty, I know
she thought of him as an old person too; sitting by their fireside,
late in life, mature, deep-souled, wise with the wisdom of years,
going back with her, fondly, to recall the old, old happiness of their
bridal journey, when they set off for the happy honeymoon abroad, and
the long life now past stretched brightly out before them both. She
never spoke of this, and you children never knew it; but it was always
in her mind.

There was a plain stone in the little Surrey churchyard, now gray and
moss-grown with the rains of forty year