At last when the wintry light was fading, when the lamps were being lit outside, and the bustle of the street seemed to penetrate in little intermittent waves of sound into the deep quiet of the room, Marie Raised herself and, with a fluttering sigh, withdrew her hand softly from her brother, and laid her arm round her husband’s neck.  He stooped to her—­kissed the sweet lips and the face on which the lines of middle age had hardly settled—­caught a wild alarm from her utter silence, called the nurse and Kendal, and all was over.

CHAPTER IX

The morning of Marie’s funeral was sunny but bitterly cold; it was one of those days when autumn finally passes into winter, and the last memory of the summer warmth vanishes from the air.  It had been the saddest, dreariest laying to rest.  The widowed sister, of whom Marie had spoken in her last hours, had been unable to come, and the two men had gone through it all alone, helped only by the tearful, impulsive sympathy and the practical energy of the maid who had been with Marie ever since her marriage, and was as yet hardly capable of realising her mistress’s death.

It was she who, while they were away, had done her best to throw a little air of comfort over the forsaken salon.  She had kindled the fire, watered the plants, and thrown open the windows to the sunshine, finding in her toil and movement some little relief from her own heart-ache and oppression.  When Paul came back, and with numb, trembling fingers had stripped himself of his scarf and his great-coat, he stepped over the threshold into the salon, and it seemed to him as though the sunlight and the open windows and the crackling blaze of the fire dealt him a sudden blow.  He walked up to the windows, and, shuddering, drew them down and closed the blinds, Felicie watching him anxiously from the landing through the half-open door.  Then he had thrown himself into a chair; and Kendal, coming softly upstairs after him, had gently closed the door from the outside, said a kind word to Felicie, and himself slipped noiselessly down again and out into the Champs Elysees.  There he had paced up and down for an hour or more under the trees, from which a few frosty leaves were still hanging in the December air.

He himself had been so stunned and bewildered by the loss which had fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors again, he was for a while scarcely able to think consecutively about it.  He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but a sort of dumb physical congeniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the sky, in the cheerful distinctness and sharpness of every outline.  And then, little by little, the cheated grief reasserted itself, the numbed senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men hold those good things whereon, so long as they