e was in mourning. It was more than a year since his
death, more than a year since the news came; she seemed as though she
would remember and mourn forever. She took both my hands in hers and
murmured, 'I had heard you were coming.' I noticed she was not very
young--I mean not girlish. She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for
belief, for suffering. The room seemed to have grown darker, as if all
the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge on her forehead.
This fair hair, this pale visage, this pure brow, seemed surrounded by
an ashy halo from which the dark eyes looked out at me. Their glance was
guileless, profound, confident, and trustful. She carried her sorrowful
head as though she were proud of that sorrow, as though she would say,
'I--I alone know how to mourn for him as he deserves.' But while we were
still shaking hands, such a look of awful desolation came upon her
face that I perceived she was one of those creatures that are not the
playthings of Time. For her he had died only yesterday. And, by Jove!
the impression was so powerful that for me, too, he seemed to have died
only yesterday--nay, this very minute. I saw her and him in the same
instant of time--his death and her sorrow--I saw her sorrow in the very
moment of his death. Do you understand? I saw them together--I heard
them together. She had said, with a deep catch of the breath, 'I have
survived' while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with
her tone of despairing regret, the summing up whisper of his eternal
condemnation. I asked myself what I was doing there, with a sensation
of panic in my heart as though I had blundered into a place of cruel and
absurd mysteries not fit for a human being to behold. She motioned me to
a chair. We sat down. I laid the packet gently on the little table, and
she put her hand over it.... 'You knew him well,' she murmured, after
a moment of mourning silence.

"'Intimacy grows quickly out there,' I said. 'I knew him as well as it
is possible for one man to know another.'

"'And you admired him,' she said. 'It was impossible to know him and not
to admire him. Was it?'

"'He was a remarkable man,' I said, unsteadily. Then before the
appealing fixity of her gaze, that seemed to watch for more words on my
lips, I went on, 'It was impossible not to--'

"'Love him,' she finished eagerly, silencing me into an appalled
dumbness. 'How true! how true! But when you think that no one knew him
so wel