“She was happy,” said the cure, turning to go.

“Yes, it was a great romance.”

“A rare one.  She adored him.  Love is a tide that cleanses all.”

“Yet she was of the stage up to the last.  You know she would not have her husband in the room at the end.”

“She had a great heart,” said the cure quietly.  “She wished to spare him that suffering.”

“She had an extraordinary will,” said the doctor, glancing at him quickly.  He added, tentatively:  “She asked two questions that were curious enough.”

“Indeed,” said the cure, lingering a moment with his hand on the gate.

“She wanted to know whether persons in a delirium talked of the past and if after death the face returned to its calm.”

“What did you say to her about the effects of delirium?” said the cure with his blank face.

“That it was a point difficult to decide,” said the doctor slowly.  “Undoubtedly, in a delirium, everything is mixed, the real and the imagined, the memory and the fantasy, actual experience and the inner dream-life of the mind which is so difficult to classify.  It was after that, that she made her husband promise to see her only when she was conscious and to remain away at the last.”

“It is easily understood,” said the cure quietly, without change of expression on his face that held the secrets of a thousand confessionals.  “As you say, for ten years she had lived a different life.  She was afraid that in her delirium some reference to that time might wound unnecessarily the man who had made over her life.  She had a great courage.  Peace be with her soul.”

“Still,”—­Doctor Kimball hesitated, as though considering the phrasing of a delicate question; but Father Francois, making a little amical sign of adieu, passed out of the garden, and for a moment his blank face was illumined by one of those rare smiles, such as one sees on the faces of holy men; smiles that seem in perfect faith to look upon the mysteries of the world to come.

EVEN THREES

I

Ever since the historic day when a visiting clergyman accomplished the feat of pulling a ball from the tenth tee at an angle of two hundred and twenty-five degrees into the river that is the rightful receptacle for the eighth tee, the Stockbridge golf-course has had seventeen out of the eighteen holes that are punctuated with possible water hazards.  The charming course itself lies in the flat of the sunken meadows which the Housatonic, in the few thousand years which are necessary for the proper preparation of a golf-course, has obligingly eaten out of the high, accompanying bluffs.  The river, which goes wriggling on its way as though convulsed with merriment, is garnished with luxurious elms and willows, which occasionally deflect to the difficult putting-greens the random slices of certain notorious amateurs.