"We saw him from the roof," she went on. "He came down the lime-avenue
toward the house. He was dressed just as he is in that picture. My
husband saw him first. He was frightened, and ran down ahead of me; but
there was no one there. He had vanished."

"Elwell had vanished?" Parvis faltered.

"Yes." Their two whispers seemed to grope for each other. "I couldn't
think what had happened. I see now. He TRIED to come then; but he wasn't
dead enough--he couldn't reach us. He had to wait for two months; and
then he came back again--and Ned went with him."

She nodded at Parvis with the look of triumph of a child who has
successfully worked out a difficult puzzle. But suddenly she lifted her
hands with a desperate gesture, pressing them to her bursting temples.

"Oh, my God! I sent him to Ned--I told him where to go! I sent him to
this room!" she screamed out.

She felt the walls of the room rush toward her, like inward falling
ruins; and she heard Parvis, a long way off, as if through the ruins,
crying to her, and struggling to get at her. But she was numb to his
touch, she did not know what he was saying. Through the tumult she heard
but one clear note, the voice of Alida Stair, speaking on the lawn at
Pangbourne.

"You won't know till afterward," it said. "You won't know till long,
long afterward."

The End of Afterward

THE FULNESS OF LIFE

December 1893

I.

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet
lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the
heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk
in the tasselled meadow-grasses, one looks up through a level roofing
of maple-leaves at the vast shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and
then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her,
like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it
was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless
stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without
a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the
vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but
now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesque
visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting
lines of verse, obstinate presentments of pictures once beheld,
indistinct impressions of