ng dimly through the linen that veiled it, was like the face of one
who sleeps very peacefully. Very gently she uncovered it.

He was not simply still, he was immensely still. He was more still and
white than the moonlight outside, remoter than moon or stars.... She
stood surveying him.

He looked small and pinched and as though he had been very tired. Life
was over for him, altogether over. Never had she seen anything that
seemed so finished. Once, when she was a girl she had thought that death
might be but the opening of a door upon a more generous feast of living
than this cramped world could give, but now she knew, she saw, that
death can be death.

Life was over. She felt she had never before realized the meaning of
death. That beautiful night outside, and all the beautiful nights and
days that were still to come and all the sweet and wonderful things of
God's world could be nothing to him now for ever. There was no dream in
him that could ever live again, there was no desire, no hope in him.

And had he ever had his desire or his hope, or felt the intensities of
life?

There was this beauty she had been discovering in the last few years,
this mystery of love,--all that had been hidden from him.

She began to realize something sorrowful and pitiful in his quality, in
his hardness, his narrowness, his bickering suspicions, his malignant
refusals of all things generous and beautiful. He made her feel, as
sometimes the children made her feel, the infinite pity of perversity
and resistance to the bounties and kindliness of life.

The shadow of sorrow for him came to her at last.

Yet how obstinate he looked, the little frozen white thing that had been
Sir Isaac Harman! And satisfied, wilfully satisfied; his lips were
compressed and his mouth a little drawn in at the corners as if he would
not betray any other feeling than content with the bargain he had made
with life. She did not touch him; not for the world would she ever touch
that cold waxen thing that had so lately clasped her life, but she stood
for a long time by the side of his quiet, immersed in the wonder of
death....

He had been such a hard little man, such a pursuing little man, so
unreasonable and difficult a master, and now--he was such a poor
shrunken little man for all his obstinacy! She had never realized before
that he was pitiful.... Had she perhaps feared him too much, disliked
him too much to deal fairly with him? Could she have helped h