'I'll not be keeping you long, Glory, I'll not be keeping you long,' and
then I could have died for shame.

* * * * *

"Evening.--All afternoon he has been like a child, and everything present
to his consciousness seems to have been reversed. The shadow of eternity
appears to have wiped out time. When I have raised him up in bed he has
delighted to think he was a little boy in his young mother's arms. Oh,
sweet dream! The old man with his furrowed forehead and beautiful white
head and all the heavy years rolled back! More than once he has asked me
if he may play till bedtime, and I have stroked his wrinkled hands and
told him 'Yes,' for I pretend to be his mother, who died, when she was
old.

"But the 'part' is almost too much for me, and, lest I should break down
under the strain of it, I am going out of his room constantly. I have
just been into his study. It is as full as ever of his squeezes and
rubbings and plaster casts and dusty old runes. He has spent all his life
away back in the tenth century, and now he is going farther, farther....

"Oh, I'm aweary, aweary! If anything happens to grandfather I shall soon
leave this place; there will be nothing to hold me here any longer, and
besides I could not bear the sight of these evidences of his gentle
presence, so simple, so touching. But what a vain thing London is with
all its vast ado--how little, how pitiful!

* * * * *

"Later.--It is all over! The curtain has fallen, and I am not crying. If
I did cry it would not be from grief, but because the end was so
beautiful, so glorious! It was at sunset, and the streamers of the sun
were coming horizontally into the room. He awoke from a long drowsiness,
and a serenity almost angelic overspread his face. I could see that he
was himself once again. Death had led him back through the long years
since he was a child, and he knew he was an old man and I a young woman.
'Have the boats gone yet?' he asked, meaning the herring boats that go at
sunset. I looked out and told him they were at the point of going. 'Let
me see them sail,' he said, so I slipped my arms about him and raised him
until he was sitting up and could see down the length of the harbour and
past the castle to the sea. The reflection of the sunlight was about his
silvery old head, and over the damps and chills of death it made a
radiance on his face like a light from heaven. There was hardly a