o her than her dearest friends had seemed
before; but from now on she was to feel closer to every human being
than before to her most loved. A great breach had been made in the
wall of her life--the wall which had hidden her fellows from her. She
saw them face the enigma as uncomprehendingly, as helplessly as she,
and she felt the instinct of terror to huddle close to others, even
though they feel--_because_ they feel--a terror as unrelieved. It was
not that she loved her fellow-beings more from this hour, rather that
she felt, to the root of her being, her inevitable fellowship with
them.

The journey home was almost as wholly a period of suspended animation
for Sylvia as the days on the ocean had been. She had read the
telegram at last; now she knew what had happened, but she did not yet
know what it meant. She felt that she would not know what it meant
until she reached home. How could her mother be dead? What did it mean
to have her mother dead?

She said the grim words over and over, handling them with heartsick
recklessness as a desperate man might handle the black, ugly objects
with smoking fuses which he knows carry death. But for Sylvia no
explosion came. No ravaging perception of the meaning of the words
reached her strained inner ear. She said them over and over, the sound
of them was horrifying to her, but in her heart she did not believe
them. Her mother, _her_ mother could not die!

There was no one, of course, at the La Chance station to meet her,
and she walked out through the crowd and took the street-car without
having seen a familiar face. It was five o'clock in the afternoon
then, and six when she walked up the dusty country road and turned in
through the gate in the hedge. There was home--intimately a part of
her in every detail of its unforgotten appearance. The pines stood up
strong in their immortal verdure, the thick golden hush of the summer
afternoon lay like an enchantment about the low brown house. And
something horrible, unspeakably horrible had happened there. Under the
forgotten dust and grime of her long railway journey, she was deadly
pale as she stepped up on the porch. Judith came to the door, saw her
sister, opened her arms with a noble gesture, and clasped Sylvia to
her in a strong and close embrace. Not a word was spoken. The two
clung to each other silently, Sylvia weeping incessantly, holding fast
to the dear human body in her arms, feeling herself dissolved in a
very anguish