ticking to the frame I had had made for my photograph."

"And how was she dressed?"

"In mourning, my own dear. No great depths of crape, but simple and
scrupulous black. She had in her bonnet three small black feathers.
She carried a little muff of astrachan. She has near the left eye," he
continued, "a tiny vertical scar--"

I stopped him short. "The mark of a caress from her husband." Then I
added: "How close you must have been to her!" He made no answer to this,
and I thought he blushed, observing which I broke straight off. "Well,
goodbye."

"You won't stay a little?" He came to me again tenderly, and this time
I suffered him. "Her visit had its beauty," he murmured as he held me,
"but yours has a greater one."

I let him kiss me, but I remembered, as I had remembered the day before,
that the last kiss she had given, as I supposed, in this world had been
for the lips he touched.

"I'm life, you see," I answered. "What you saw last night was death."

"It was life--it was life!"

He spoke with a kind of soft stubbornness, and I disengaged myself. We
stood looking at each other hard.

"You describe the scene--so far as you describe it at all--in terms that
are incomprehensible. She was in the room before you knew it?"

"I looked up from my letter-writing--at that table under the lamp, I had
been wholly absorbed in it--and she stood before me."

"Then what did you do?"

"I sprang up with an ejaculation, and she, with a smile, laid her
finger, ever so warningly, yet with a sort of delicate dignity, to her
lips. I knew it meant silence, but the strange thing was that it seemed
immediately to explain and to justify her. We, at any rate, stood for
a time that, as I've told you, I can't calculate, face to face. It was
just as you and I stand now."

"Simply staring?"

He impatiently protested. "Ah! _we're_ not staring!"

"Yes, but we're talking."

"Well, _we_ were--after a fashion." He lost himself in the memory of it.
"It was as friendly as this." I had it on my tongue's end to ask if
that were saying much for it, but I remarked instead that what they had
evidently done was to gaze in mutual admiration. Then I inquired whether
his recognition of her had been immediate. "Not quite," he replied,
"for, of course, I didn't expect her; but it came to me long before she
went who she was--who she could only be."

I thought a little. "And how did she at last go?"

"Just as she arrived. The door was open behin