The quieting of the house, it seemed, would never come.  It was twelve o’clock before any one came up-stairs.  I heard one door after another shut, and then sat waiting and wondering why Richard did not come, till the moments seemed to grow to centuries.  At last I heard him at the door, and I went toward it trembling, and followed him into the hall.  He carried a light, for up-stairs it was all dark, and when we reached the stairway, he took my hand to lead me.  I was trembling very much; the hall below was dimly lit by a large lamp which had been turned low.  Our steps on the bare staircase made so much noise, though we tried to move so silently.  It was weird and awful.  I clung to Richard’s hand in silence.  He led me across the hall, and stopped before the library-door.  He let go my hand, and taking a key from his pocket, put it in the lock, turned it slowly, then opened the door a little way, and motioned me to enter.

Like one in a trance, I obeyed him, and went in alone.  He shut the door noiselessly, and left me with the dead.

That was the great, the immense hour of my life.  No vicissitude, no calamity of this mortal state, no experience that may be to come, can ever have the force, the magnitude of this.  All feelings, but a child’s feelings, were comparatively new to me, and here, at one moment, I had put into my hand the plummet that sounded hell; anguish, remorse, fear—­a woman’s heart in hopeless pain.  For I will not believe that any child, that any woman, had ever loved more absolutely, more passionately, than I had loved the man who lay there dead before me.  But I cannot talk about what I felt in those moments; all that concerns what I write is the external.

The—­coffin was in the middle of the room, where the table ordinarily stood—­where my chair had been that night, when he told me his story.  Surely if I sinned, in thought, in word, that night, I paid its full atonement, this.  Candles stood on a small table at the head of where he lay, and many flowers were about the room.  The smell of verbena-leaves filled the air:  a branch of them was in a vase that some one had put beside his coffin.  The fresh, cool night-air came in from the large window, open at the top.

His face was, as Richard said, much as in life, only quieter.  I do not know what length of time Richard left me there, but at last, I was recalled to the present, by his hand upon my shoulder, and his voice in a whisper, “Come with me now, Pauline.”

I rose to my feet, hardly understanding what he said, but resisted when I did understand him.

“Come with me,” he said, gently, “You shall come back again and say good-bye.  Only come out into the hall and stay awhile with me; it is not good for you to be here so long.”