When he softly returned into the room he found Marie lying as though asleep upon, her husband’s arm.  It seemed to him that since he had left her there had been a change.  The face was more drawn, the look of exhaustion more defined.  Paul sat beside her, his eyes riveted upon her.  He scarcely seemed to notice his brother-in-law’s entrance; it was as though he were rapidly losing consciousness of every fact but one; and never had Kendal seen any countenance so grief-stricken, so pinched with longing.  But Marie heard the familiar step.  She made a faint movement with her hand towards him, and he resumed his old place, his head bowed upon the bed.  And so they sat through the morning, hardly moving, interchanging at long intervals a few words—­those sad sacred words which well from the heart in the supreme moments of existence—­words which, in the case of such natures as Marie de Chateauvieux, represent the intimate truths and fundamental ideas of the life that has gone before.  There was nothing to hide, nothing to regret.  A few kindly messages, a few womanly commissions, and every now and then a few words to her husband, as simple as the rest, but pregnant with the deepest thoughts and touching the vastest problems of humanity,—­this was all.  Marie was dying as she had lived—­bravely, tenderly, simply.

Presently they roused her to take some nourishment, which she swallowed with difficulty.  It gave her a momentary strength.  Kendal heard himself called, and looked up.  She had opened the hand lying on the bed, and he saw in it a small miniature case, which she moved towards him.

‘Take it,’ she said—­oh, how faintly!—­’to her.  It is the only memento I can think of.  She has been ill, Eustace:  did I tell you?  I forget.  I should have gone—­but for this.  It is too much for her,—­that life.  It will break her down.  You can save her and cherish her—­you will.  It seems as if I saw you—­together!’

Then her eyes fell and she seemed to sleep—­gently wandering now and then, and mentioning in her dying dream names and places which made the reality before them more and more terrible to the two hushed listeners, so different were the associations they called up.  Was this white nerveless form, from which mind and breath were gently ebbing away, all that fate had grudgingly left to them, for a few more agonised moments, of the brilliant, high-bred woman who had been but yesterday the centre of an almost European network of friendships and interests!  Love, loss, death,—­oh, how unalterable is this essential content of life, embroider it and adorn it as we may!

Kendal had been startled by her words about Isabel Bretherton.  He had not heard of any illness; it could hardly be serious, for he vaguely remembered that in the newspapers he had tried to read on the journey his eye had caught the familiar advertisement of the Calliope.  It must have happened while he was in Surrey.  He vaguely speculated about it now and then as he sat watching through the afternoon.  But nothing seemed to matter very much to him—­nothing but Marie and the slow on-coming of death.