by a wood fire at one end of the room,
looking, oh, so worn and pale!--as he always does when he is ill, you
know. Ah, it is so good that you _do_ know! Even his red smoking jacket
lent no color to his face. His first words were not to tell me how ill
he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the
last strokes to the score of his _Souvenirs d'Automne_. He was as I
most like to remember him: so calm and happy and tired; not gay, as he
usually is, but just contented and tired with that heavenly tiredness
that comes after a good work done at last. Outside, the rain poured
down in torrents, and the wind moaned for the pain of all the world and
sobbed in the branches of the shivering olives and about the walls of
that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were
no lights in the room, only the wood fire which glowed upon the hard
features of the bronze Dante, like the reflection of purgatorial flames,
and threw long black shadows about us; beyond us it scarcely penetrated
the gloom at all, Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness
of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire
and suffer to make up one such life as his. Somehow the wind with all
its world-pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes,
and the wave came up in both of us at once--that awful, vague, universal
pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope--and we were
like two clinging together on a spar in midocean after the shipwreck of
everything. Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind
that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights,
announcing that Madam had returned, _'and in the book we read no more
that night.'_"

She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with the hard,
bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a
glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn like a mask through so
many years, had gradually changed even the lines of her face completely,
and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing
critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself. Everett dropped
his head upon his hand and sat looking at the rug. "How much you have
cared!" he said.

"Ah, yes, I cared," she replied, closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh
of relief; and lying perfectly still, she went on: "You can't imagine
what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a