e dim and dreadful
chamber where she lay locked up in death and where, asking after a
little to be left alone with her, I remained for half an hour. Death had
made her, had kept her beautiful; but I felt above all, as I kneeled at
her bed, that it had made her, had kept her silent. It had turned the
key on something I was concerned to know.

On my return from Richmond and after another duty had been performed I
drove to his chambers. It was the first time, but I had often wanted to
see them. On the staircase, which, as the house contained twenty sets of
rooms, was unrestrictedly public, I met his servant, who went back with
me and ushered me in. At the sound of my entrance he appeared in the
doorway of a further room, and the instant we were alone I produced my
news: "She's dead!"

"Dead?"

He was tremendously struck, and I observed that he had no need to ask
whom, in this abruptness, I meant.

"She died last evening--just after leaving me."

He stared with the strangest expression, his eyes searching mine as
if they were looking for a trap. "Last evening--after leaving you?" He
repeated my words in stupefaction. Then he brought out so that it was in
stupefaction I heard: "Impossible! I saw her."

"You 'saw' her?"

"On that spot--where you stand."

This brought back to me after an instant, as if to help me to take it
in, the memory of the strange warning of his youth. "In the hour of
death--I understand: as you so beautifully saw your mother."

"Ah! _not_ as I saw my mother--not that way, not that way!" He was
deeply moved by my news--far more moved, I perceived, than he would have
been the day before: it gave me a vivid sense that, as I had then said
to myself, there was indeed a relation between them and that he had
actually been face to face with her. Such an idea, by its reassertion
of his extraordinary privilege, would have suddenly presented him as
painfully abnormal had he not so vehemently insisted on the difference.
"I saw her living--I saw her to speak to her--I saw her as I see you
now!"

It is remarkable that for a moment, though only for a moment, I found
relief in the more personal, as it were, but also the more natural of
the two phenomena. The next, as I embraced this image of her having come
to him on leaving me and of just what it accounted for in the disposal
of her time, I demanded with a shade of harshness of which I was
aware--"What on earth did she come for?" He had now had a minute t