Both men knew there was no hope.  The maid-servant retired, and she did not close the door, nor did she ask if the doctor should be sent for.  One man held the bed rail, looking at his dead daughter; the other sat by the window.  That one was John Norton.  His brain was empty, everything was far away.  He saw things moving, moving, but they were all so far away.  He could not re-knit himself with the weft of life; the thread that had made him part of it had been snapped, and he was left struggling in space.  He knew that Kitty had thrown herself out of the window and was dead.  The word shocked him a little, but there was no sense of realisation to meet it.  She had walked with him on the hills, she had accompanied him as far as the burgh; she had waved her hand to him before they walked quite out of each other’s sight.  They had been speaking of Italy ... of Italy where they would have spent their honeymoon.  Now she was dead!  There would be no honeymoon, no wife.  How unreal, how impossible it all did seem, and yet it was real, yes, real enough.  There she lay dead; here is her room, and there is her book-case; there are the photographs of the Miss Austins, here is the fuchsia with the pendent blossoms falling, and her canary is singing.  John glanced at the cage, and the song went to his brain, and he was horrified, for there was no grief in his heart.

Had he not loved her?  Yes, he was sure of that; then why was there no burning grief nor any tears?  He envied the hard-sobbing father’s grief, the father who, prostrate by the bedside, held his dead daughter’s hand, and showed a face wild with fear—­a face on which was printed so deeply the terror of the soul’s emotion, that John felt a supernatural awe creep upon him; felt that his presence was a sort of sacrilege.  He crept downstairs.  He went into the drawing-room, and looked about for the place he had last seen her in.  There it was....  There.  But his eyes wandered from the place, for it was there he had seen the startled face, the half mad face which he had seen afterwards at the window, quite mad.

On that sofa she usually sat; how often had he seen her sitting there!  And now he would not see her any more.  And only three days ago she had been sitting in the basket chair.  How well he remembered her words, her laughter, and now ... now; was it possible he never would hear her laugh again?  How frail a thing is human life, how shadow-like; one moment it is here, the next it is gone.  Here is her work-basket; and here the very ball of wool which he had held for her to wind; and here is a novel which she had lent to him, and which he had forgotten to take away.  He would never read it now; or perhaps he should read it in memory of her, of her whom yesterday he parted with on the hills,—­her little puritan look, her external girlishness, her golden brown hair and the sudden laugh so characteristic of her....  She had lent him this book—­she who was now but clay; she who was to have been his