m. After that, nothing mattered.
She wanted to die and be out of her misery. When Mr. Reeves had been
taken into her room her face had been covered with a white veil, and Max
must prepare himself to be received in the same way. It was better that
he should know this beforehand and be spared a shock.

Never to see that beautiful face again in this world! Max felt like one
dead and galvanized as he walked into the house and was received by a
doctor--some great specialist whose name he had heard, but whom he had
never chanced to meet. Not once did his thoughts rush back to Billie
Brookton, and the night when he had meant to put on her finger the blue
diamond in the platinum ring. Billie was in another world, a world a
million miles away, as following the doctor Max walked softly into his
mother's room.

There he had once more that insistent feeling of unreality. The gay room
with its shell-pink melting into yellow and orange looked so unsuited to
any condition but joy that it was impossible to believe tragedy had
stalked in uninvited. Even with the morning light shut out by the drawn
yellow curtains, and the electricity turned on in the flower or
gauze-shaded lamps, it looked a place dedicated to the joy of life and
beauty. But when, with a physical effort, Max turned his eyes to the
bed, copied from one where Marie Antoinette had slept, he saw that which
seemed to throw a pall of crape over the fantastic golden harmonies. A
figure lay there, very straight, very flat and long under the coverlet
pulled high over the breast. Even the hands were hidden: and over the
face was spread a white veil of chiffon, folded double, so that no gleam
of eye, no feature could even be guessed at.

Until that moment, Max had kept his self-control. But at sight of that
piteous form, and remembering the radiant face framed with great bunches
of red-gold hair, which he had kissed good-bye, in this very bed not
three months ago, the dam which had held back the flood of anguish
broke. It was as if his heart had turned to water. Tears sprang from his
eyes, and the strength went out of his knees. It was all he could do not
to fall at the side of the bed and to sob out his mother's name, telling
her that he would give his life a hundred times for hers if that could
be, or that he would go out of the world with her rather than she should
go alone. But something came to his help and kept him outwardly calm
save for a slight choking in the throat as