ng lady who's been coming to see
him--"

They both stopped. Lindau's grand, patriarchal head, foreshortened to
their view, lay white upon the pillow, and his broad, white beard flowed
upon the sheet, which heaved with those long last breaths. Beside his
bed Margaret Vance was kneeling; her veil was thrown back, and her face
was lifted; she held clasped between her hands the hand of the dying
man; she moved her lips inaudibly.

X.

In spite of the experience of the whole race from time immemorial, when
death comes to any one we know we helplessly regard it as an incident
of life, which will presently go on as before. Perhaps this is an
instinctive perception of the truth that it does go on somewhere; but
we have a sense of death as absolutely the end even for earth only if it
relates to some one remote or indifferent to us. March tried to project
Lindau to the necessary distance from himself in order to realize the
fact in his case, but he could not, though the man with whom his youth
had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually reentered
the region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree.
The changed conditions forbade that. He had a soreness of heart
concerning him; but he could not make sure whether this soreness was
grief for his death, or remorse for his own uncandor with him about
Dryfoos, or a foreboding of that accounting with his conscience which
he knew his wife would now exact of him down to the last minutest
particular of their joint and several behavior toward Lindau ever since
they had met him in New York.

He felt something knock against his shoulder, and he looked up to have
his hat struck from his head by a horse's nose. He saw the horse put
his foot on the hat, and he reflected, "Now it will always look like an
accordion," and he heard the horse's driver address him some sarcasms
before he could fully awaken to the situation. He was standing
bareheaded in the middle of Fifth Avenue and blocking the tide of
carriages flowing in either direction. Among the faces put out of the
carriage windows he saw that of Dryfoos looking from a coupe. The old
man knew him, and said, "Jump in here, Mr. March"; and March, who had
mechanically picked up his hat, and was thinking, "Now I shall have
to tell Isabel about this at once, and she will never trust me on the
street again without her," mechanically obeyed. Her confidence in him
had been undermined by his being so near Co