o
think--to recover himself and judge of effects, so that if it was still
with excited eyes he spoke he showed a conscious redness and made an
inconsequent attempt to smile away the gravity of his words.

"She came just to see me. She came--after what had passed at your
house--so that we _should_, after all, at last meet. The impulse seemed
to me exquisite, and that was the way I took it."

I looked round the room where she had been--where she had been and I
never had been.

"And was the way you took it the way she expressed it?"

"She only expressed it by being here and by letting me look at her. That
was enough!" he exclaimed with a singular laugh.

I wondered more and more. "You mean she didn't speak to you?"

"She said nothing. She only looked at me as I looked at her."

"And _you_ didn't speak either?"

He gave me again his painful smile. "I thought of _you_. The situation
was every way delicate. I used the finest tact. But she saw she had
pleased me." He even repeated his dissonant laugh.

"She evidently pleased you!" Then I thought a moment. "How long did she
stay?"

"How can I say? It seemed twenty minutes, but it was probably a good
deal less."

"Twenty minutes of silence!" I began to have my definite view and now
in fact quite to clutch at it. "Do you know you're telling me a story
positively monstrous?"

He had been standing with his back to the fire; at this, with a pleading
look, he came to me. "I beseech you, dearest, to take it kindly."

I could take it kindly, and I signified as much; but I couldn't somehow,
as he rather awkwardly opened his arms, let him draw me to him. So
there fell between us for an appreciable time the discomfort of a great
silence.

VI

He broke it presently by saying: "There's absolutely no doubt of her
death?"

"Unfortunately none. I've just risen from my knees by the bed where
they've laid her out."

He fixed his eyes hard on the floor; then he raised them to mine. "How
does she look?"

"She looks--at peace."

He turned away again, while I watched him; but after a moment he began:
"At what hour, then----?"

"It must have been near midnight. She dropped as she reached her
house--from an affection of the heart which she knew herself and her
physician knew her to have, but of which, patiently, bravely she had
never spoken to me."

He listened intently and for a minute he was unable to speak. At last
he broke out with an accent of which the almost