hich helped to swell the shining
current of Adriance Hilgarde's. It was not the first time that his duty
had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his
brother's imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no
attempt to analyze the situation or to state it in exact terms; but
he felt Katharine Gaylord's need for him, and he accepted it as a
commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he
felt her demands on him grow more imperious, her need for him grow more
acute and positive; and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation
to her his own individuality played a smaller and smaller part. His
power to minister to her comfort, he saw, lay solely in his link with
his brother's life. He understood all that his physical resemblance
meant to her. He knew that she sat by him always watching for some
common trick of gesture, some familiar play of expression, some illusion
of light and shadow, in which he should seem wholly Adriance. He knew
that she lived upon this and that her disease fed upon it; that it sent
shudders of remembrance through her and that in the exhaustion which
followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet and
dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden,
and not of bitterness and death.

The question which most perplexed him was, "How much shall I know? How
much does she wish me to know?" A few days after his first meeting with
Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He had merely
said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the
right thing--that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said not
only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. His
phrases took the color of the moment and the then-present condition, so
that they never savored of perfunctory compliment or frequent usage. He
always caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion
of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing, the
opportune, graceful, exquisite thing--except, when he did very cruel
things--bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his,
just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful;
lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich
nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were
no longer near, forgetting--for that also was a part of Adriance's gift.

Three wee