Heart-constricting silence, and only the breath of ether seeping out to her, sweet, insidious.  She took to hugging herself violently against a sudden chill that rushed over her, rattling her frame.

The bedroom door swung noiselessly back, fanning out the etheric fumes, and closed again upon an emerging figure.

“Doctor—­quick—­God!—­What?”

He looked down upon her with the kind of glaze over his eyes that Bellini loved to paint, compassion for the pain of the world almost distilled to tears.

“Doctor—­he ain’t—­”

“My poor little lady!”

“O God—­no—­no—­no!  No, Doctor, no!  You wouldn’t!  Please!  Please!  You wouldn’t let him leave me here all alone, Doctor!  O God! you wouldn’t!  I’m all alone, Doctor!  You see, I’m all alone.  Please don’t take him from me.  He’s mine!  You can’t!  Promise me, Doctor!  My darlin’ in there—­why are you hurtin’ him so?  Why has he stopped hollerin’?  Cut me to pieces to give him what he needs to make him live.  Don’t take him from me, Doctor.  He’s all I got!  O God—­God—­please!” And fell back swooning, with an old man’s tear splashing down as if to revivify her.

* * * * *

The heart has a resiliency.  Strained to breaking, it can contract again.  Even the waiting women, Iseult and Penelope, learned, as they sat sorrowing and watching, to sing to the swing of the sea.

When, out of the slough of dark weeks, Mrs. Connors took up life again, she was only beaten, not broken—­a reed lashed down by storm and then resilient, daring to lift its head again.  A wan little head, but the eyes unwashed of their blue and the irises grown large.  The same hard sunshine lay in its path between the brocade curtains of a room strangely denuded.  It was as if spring had died there, when it was only the chaise-longue, barren of its lacy pillows, a glass vase and silver-framed picture gone from the mantel, a Mexican afghan removed from a divan and showing its bulges.

It was any hotel suite now—­uncompromising; leave me or take me.

In taking leave of it, Mrs. Connors looked about her even coldly, as if this barren room were too denuded of its memories.

“You—­you been mighty good to me, Joe.  It’s good to know—­everything’s—­paid up.”

Mr. Joe Kirby sat well forward on a straight chair, knees well apart in the rather puffy attitude of the uncomfortably corpulent.

“Now, cut that!  Whatever I done for you, Annie, I done because I wanted to.  If you’d ‘a’ listened to me, you wouldn’t ‘a’ gone and sold out your last dud to raise money.  Whatcha got friends for?”

“The way you dug down for—­for the funeral, Joe.  He—­he couldn’t have had the silver handles or the gray velvet if—­if not for you, Joe.  He—­he always loved everything the best.  I can’t never forget that of you, Joe—­just never.”

She was pinning on her little crepe-edged veil over her decently black hat, and paused now to dab up under it at a tear.