to rouse her
to the truth. To all her mother's inquiries Annie invariably replied,
"Better, dear mamma, better, only very weak," and Aunt Ann believed,
until the very last, that the spring would make her well again.

Edward Neal's face during these weeks was like the face of a man lost in a
trackless desert, seeking vainly for some sign of road to save his life.
Sickness and death were as foreign to the young, vital, irrepressible
currents of his life, as if he had been a bird or an antelope. But it was
not now with him the mere bewildered grief of a sensuous animal nature,
such as I should have anticipated that his grief would be. He dimly felt
the truth, and was constantly terrified by it. He came into Annie's
presence more and more reverently each day. He gazed speechlessly into her
eyes, which rested on him always with angelic compassion and tenderness,
but with no more look of human wifely thought than if he and she were
kneeling side by side before God's white throne. Sometimes he dared not
touch even so much as the hand on which his own wedding-ring rested.
Sometimes he would kneel by the bedside and bury his face and weep like a
little child. Then he would throw himself on his horse and gallop away and
not come home until twilight, when he was always found on Annie's lounge
in the library. One night when I went to him there he said, in a tone so
solemn that the voice did not sound like his,--

"Helen, there is something I do not understand about Annie. Do people
always seem so when they are going to die? I do not dare to ask her if she
loves me. I feel just as much awe of her as if she had been in heaven. It
seems sometimes as if I must be going mad, for I do not feel in the least
as if she had ever been my wife."

"She never has, poor boy," I thought, but I only stroked his hair and
said nothing; wondering in my heart at the certainty with which in all
natures love knows how to define, conquer, reclaim his own.

The day before Annie died she asked for her jewel-case, and spent several
hours in looking over its contents and telling me to whom they should be
given. I observed that she seemed to be searching uneasily for something
she could not find.

"What is it, dear?" I said. She hesitated for a secondhand then replied,--

"Only a little ring I had when I was a girl."

"When you were a girl, my darling!" I exclaimed. She smiled gently and
said,--

"I feel like an old woman now. Oh, here it is," she adde