Slowly Marie prepares to go.  She has closed the neck of her dress and hidden herself in her cloak.  She comes up to me, sore-hearted, and with her tears for a moment quenched she smiles at me without speaking.  I half rise, my hands tremble towards her smile as if to touch it, above the past and the dust of my second mother.

Towards the end of the night, when the dead fire is scattering chilliness, the women go away one by one.  One hour, two hours, I remain alone.  I pace the room in one direction and another, then I look, and shiver.  My aunt is no more.  There is only left of her something indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her place is desolate.  Now, close to her, I am alone!  Alone—­magnified by my affliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness of the things now beginning.  At last the window grows pale, the ceiling turns gray, and the candle-flames wink in the first traces of light.

I shiver without end.  In the depth of my dawn, in the heart of this room where I have always been, I recall the image of a woman who filled it—­a woman standing at the chimney-corner, where a gladsome fire flames, and she is garbed in reflected purple, her corsage scarlet, her face golden, as she holds to the glow those hands transparent and beautiful as flames.  In the darkness, from my vigil, I look at her.

* * * * * *

The two nights which followed were spent in mournful motionlessness at the back of that room where the trembling host of lights seemed to give animation to dead things.  During the two days various activities brought me distraction, at first distressing, then depressing.

The last night I opened my aunt’s jewel box.  It was called “the little box.”  It was on the dressing table, at the bottom of piled-up litter.  I found some topaz ear-rings of a bygone period, a gold cross, equally outdistanced, small and slender—­a little girl’s, or a young girl’s; and then, wrapped in tissue paper, like a relic, a portrait of myself when a child.  Last, a written page, torn from one of my old school copy-books, which she had not been able to throw wholly away.  Transparent at the folds, the worn sheet was fragile as lace, and gave the illusion of being equally precious.  That was all the treasure my aunt had collected.  That jewel box held the poverty of her life and the wealth of her heart.

* * * * * *

It poured with rain on the day of the funeral.  All the morning groups of people succeeded each other in the big cavern of our room, a going and coming of sighs.  My aunt was laid in her coffin towards two o’clock, and it was carried then into the passage, where visitors’ feet had brought dirt and puddles.  A belated wreath was awaited, and then the umbrellas opened, and under their black undulation the procession moved off.