“Gerard, old chap, are you all right?—­Gerard—­”

There was no answer, and the room seemed unaccountably still.  He listened for the sound of breathing, but he couldn’t hear it.

“Gerard!” he cried, again louder, but there was still no answer; and then, with the silence, a chill terror began to creep through his blood.  He had never yet seen death; and perhaps if he had the terror in his thought would not have been lessened.  With a heart that had almost stopped beating, and knees that shook beneath him, he pushed open the door and walked over to the bed.  It was still too dark to see more than outlines and masses of white and black; but even so he could see that the stillness with which Gerard was lying was the stillness of death.

His next thought was to rouse Aunt Tipping; and together the two bent over the dead face.

“Yes, he’s gone,” said Aunt Tipping; “poor gentlemen, how beautiful he looks!” and they both gazed in silence upon the calm, smiling face.

“Well, he’s better off,” she said, presently, leaning over him, and softly pressing down the lids of his eyes.

Henry involuntarily drew away.

“Dear lad, there’s nothing to be frightened of,” said his aunt.  “He’s as harmless as a baby.”

Then she took a handkerchief from a drawer, and spread it gently over the dead man’s face.  To Aunt Tipping the dead were indeed as little children, and inspired her with a strange motherly tenderness.  Many had been the tired silent ones whose eyes she had closed, and whose limbs she had washed against their last resting place.  They were so helpless now; they could do nothing any more for themselves.

Later in the day, Henry came again and sat long by the dead man’s side.  It seemed uncompanionable to have grown thus suddenly afraid of him, to leave him thus alone in that still room.  And as he sat and watched him, he gave to his memory a solemn service of faithful thought.  Thus it was he went over again the words in which Gerard had made him the depository, the legatee, of his most sacred possession.

Gerard had evidently had some presentiment of his approaching end.

“I am going,” he had said, “to place the greatest confidence in you one man can place in another, pay you the greatest compliment.  I shall die some day, and something tells me that that divine event is not very far off.  Now I have no one in the world who cares an old ‘J’ pen for me, and a new one is perhaps about as much as I care for any one—­with one exception, and that is a woman whom I shall never see again.  She is not dead, but has been worse than dead for me these ten years.  I am optimist enough to believe that her old love for me still survives, making sweet the secret places of her soul.  Never once in all these years to have doubted her love has been more than most marriages; but were I to live for another ten years, and still another, I would believe in it still.