osed door.
The father and son lay together, side by side, the boy's face in a very
winning repose, which at first sight concealed the traces of his long
suffering; the father's also--closed eyes and sternly shut
mouth--suggesting, not the despair which had driven him to his death,
but, rather, as in sombre triumph, the all-forgetting, all-effacing
sleep which he had won from death.
They stood a moment, till Delafield fell on his knees. Julie knelt
beside him. She prayed for a while; then she wearied, being, indeed,
worn out with her journey. But Delafield was motionless, and it seemed
to Julie that he hardly breathed.
She rose to her feet, and found her eyes for the first time flooded with
tears. Never for many weeks had she felt so lonely, or so utterly
unhappy. She would have given anything to forget herself in comforting
Jacob. But he seemed to have no need of her, no thought of her.
As she vaguely looked round her, she saw that beside the dead man was a
table holding some violets--the only flowers in the room--some
photographs, and a few well--worn books. Softly she took up one. It was
a copy of the _Meditations of Marcus Aurelius_, much noted and
underlined. It would have seemed to her sacrilege to look too close; but
she presently perceived a letter between its pages, and in the morning
light, which now came strongly into the room through a window looking on
the garden, she saw plainly that it was written on thin, foreign paper,
that it was closed, and addressed to her husband.
"Jacob!"
She touched him softly on the shoulder, alarmed by his long immobility.
He looked up, and it appeared to Julie as though he were shaking off
with difficulty some abnormal and trancelike state. But he rose, looking
at her strangely.
"Jacob, this is yours."
He took the book abruptly, almost as if she had no right to be holding
it. Then, as he saw the letter, the color rushed into his face. He took
it, and after a moment's hesitation walked to the window and opened it.
She saw him waver, and ran to his support. But he put out a hand which
checked her.
"It was the last thing he wrote," he said; and then, uncertainly, and
without reading any but the first words of the letter, he put it into
his pocket.
Julie drew back, humiliated. His gesture said that to a secret so
intimate and sacred he did not propose to admit his wife.
They went back silently to the room from which they had come. Sentence
after sentenc
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