hen he was gone, Fausch went
back to his workshop.

Maria's child, poor wee man, lay in the maid's room. But Maria died two
days after the doctor's visit. She died late in the afternoon. All was
silent on the road, in the workshop below, and in the upper room, where
a few people from Waltheim went in and out, the minister, the doctor, a
distant relative of Maria's and the midwife, who had been taking care
of the dying woman.

The evening slowly changed to night. The silence in the smithy and all
around it grew still deeper. Only Katharine still moved about in her
soft old shoes that made almost no sound. Stephen Fausch rose from the
table, where he had been eating something late at night. He had left
the room dark, and it was as bare and gloomy as a cellar. With a few
steps he crossed the room, and opened the door of the bedroom where
Maria lay dead.

There was a great contrast between this room and the dark living room
from which he came. The moonlight streamed in through the bedroom
windows. The maid had put up freshly washed and starched white curtains
which gave a peculiar light. The cheap lace looked like marble openwork
artistically carved with a fine chisel. The moonlight lay clear and
dazzling, directly across the head of Maria's bed, which had been moved
out to the middle of the room. The faded blue-figured pillow case, and
the feather puff of the same color shimmered white, overlaid with a
faint, shadowy tracery, as if made expressly to throw into relief the
noble beauty of Maria's head. As Stephen Fausch entered, he cast a
timid glance at his dead wife: It was wonderful to see her lying on the
bed as if a halo shone around her. He closed the door quietly behind
him, folded his arms, and looked once more at the bed. Then he stepped
to the bedside, and stroked one of the dead woman's eyelids that had
not quite closed yet, looked at her thoughtfully once more, then lifted
her arms, which were bare almost to the shoulders and had been hidden
under the bedclothes, and laid them full length on the coverlet. Thus
he made Maria appear as if sleeping in endless peace, but he also
arranged her beautiful form so that its loveliness was seen more fully
than before. And when he had done all this, he stood once more with
folded arms by the bed and said aloud, quite calmly: "Yes, you were
beautiful, you!"

The moonlight streamed over the bed and over the dead woman, over her
pure, white brow, her cheeks, her delicate n