ing, with the
first day of recovered health.

He and she had asked for respite in vain, however; and M. de
Pastourelles slept with his fathers.

Since his death, her strength had failed her. There had been no
definite illness, but a giving way for some six or seven months of
nature's resisting powers. Also--significant sign of the strength of
all her personal affections!--in addition to the moral and physical
strain she had undergone, she had suffered much about this time from
the loss of her maid, an old servant and devoted friend, who left her
shortly after M. de Pastourelles' death--incited, forced thereto by
Eugenie--in order to marry and go out to Canada. Eugenie had missed
her sorely; and insensibly, the struggle to get well had been the
harder. The doctors ordered travel and change, and she had wandered
from place to place; only half-conscious, as it often seemed to her;
the most docile of patients; accompanied now by one member of the
family, now by another; standing as it were, like the bather who has
wandered too far from shore, between the onward current which means
destruction, and that backward struggle of the will which leads to
life. And little by little the tide of being had turned. After
a winter in Egypt, strength had begun to come back; since then
Switzerland and high air had quickened recovery; and now, physically,
Eugenie was almost herself again.

But morally, she retained a deep and lasting impress of what she had
gone through. More than ever was she a creature of tenderness, of the
most delicate perceptions, of a sensibility, as our ancestors would
have called it, too great for this hurrying world. Her unselfishness,
always one of her cradle-gifts, had become almost superhuman; and had
she been of another temperament, the men and women about her might
have instinctively shrunk from her, as too perfect--now--for human
nature's daily food. But from that she was saved by a score of most
womanish, most mundane qualities. Nobody knew her, luckily, for the
saint she was; she herself least of all. As her strength renewed
itself, her soft fun, too, came back, her gentle, inexhaustible
delight in the absurdities of men and things, which gave to her talk
and her personality a kind of crackling charm, like the crispness of
dry leaves upon an autumn path. Naturally, and invincibly, she loved
life and living; all the high forces and emotions called to her, but
also all the patches, stains, and follies of