r to me. Kiss me."

She leaned over and kissed him passionately. He smiled again, then
feebly took one of her little hands in each of his and lifted them to
his face and kissed them; then held them down upon his eyes. There was
a single heave of his great chest, and he was dead.

And the woman who fell to the floor was, apparently, as lifeless as the
silent figure on the bed.

She was not dead. We carried her to her own room--hers and his, with
the dressing-rooms attached--and she woke at last to a consciousness of
her world bereft of one human being who had been to her nearly all
there was. She was not as we had imagined she would be when she
recovered. She was not hysterical, nor did she weep. She was
singularly quiet. But that set, thoughtful look had never left her
face. She seemed some other person. I talked to her of what was to be
done. What a task that was, for I could scarcely utter words myself.
She suddenly brightened when I spoke of the crematory and what Grant's
wishes were.

"It must be as he wished," she said--"as he wished, in each small
detail." Then she said no more, and all the rest was left to me.

She was quiet and grave at the funeral of her husband and my friend.
She shed no tears; she uttered not a word. She listened quietly while
I told her how I had arranged to carry out all his wishes about
himself, or, rather, about his tenement. She did not accompany me.
There came with me on that journey only the Ape, who was red of eye and
vainly trying to conceal it all. How the youth was suffering!

I came to the home one day with an urn of bronze. There were only
ashes in it, clean and white. Jean looked at them and asked me to go
away. The urn was put, at her request, in her own apartments. It was
sealed and stood upon a mantel of the room in which she slept. I do
not believe she thought much of the ashes as representing the man who
had gone away from her. She may have thought of them as precious, just
as she did of a pair of gloves she had mended for him just before his
illness, and which she kept always with her, but I believe that of the
ashes, as of the gloves, she thought only of what her love had used in
life and left behind. That was the total of it. It was the heart, the
soul, the knowing of her that was gone.

How the Ape, how all the children cared for the small mother now!
Never was woman more watched, and guarded and waited upon. She
recognized it all, too, b