as she went quickly forward, Laura rose from the sofa upon
which she had been lying, and came a step to meet her.

"Why did you come? I didn't want you--I didn't want anyone," she said.

Before the hard tones of her voice, Gerty stood still, shrinking
slightly away in her baffled splendour. Her heart strained toward her
friend, yet when she tried to think of some comforting word that she
might utter, she found only a vacancy of scattered phrases. What would
words mean to Laura now? What word among all others was there that she
could speak to her?

For a moment, groping blindly for light, she hesitated; then her arms
opened, and she caught Laura into them in spite of her feeble effort at
resistance.

"Dearest! dearest! dearest!" she repeated, for she had found the word at
last.

Partly because she was a woman and partly because of her bitter
triumphs, she had understood that the wisdom in love is the only wisdom
which avails in the supreme agony of life. Neither philosophy nor
religion mattered now, for presently she felt that her bosom was warm
with tears, and when Laura lifted her head, the two women kissed in that
intimate knowledge which is uttered without speech.

CHAPTER VI

RENEWAL

In that strange spiritual death--which was still death though the
members of her body lived--Laura seemed to lose gradually all personal
connection with the events through which she had passed; and when after
three months she turned again to look back upon them, she found that
they stood out, clear, detached, and remote as the incidents of history.
She was not only dead herself, but the whole world about her showed to
her in a curious aspect of unreality, as if a thin veil obscured it, and
there were moments when even Adams and Gerty seemed to her to be barely
alive. To the last she had refused to return to Gramercy Park, and on the
night that she reached Gerty's house she had been aware that she was
slipping away from any actual contact with her former life. Her body
might breathe and move, but her soul and even her senses had become
inanimate, and she felt that they had ceased to take part in any words
she uttered.

Though she had persistently denied herself to her aunts, she sent for
Mr. Payne on the first day that she was able to sit up, and the only
softness she showed was in answer to the compassionate kiss he placed
upon her forehead.

"My child, my child, what did I tell you?" he asked gently.

"It is bec