red smoking-jacket lent no colour to his face.  His first words were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his ’Souvenirs d’ Automne,’ and he was as I most like to remember him; calm and happy, and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after a good work done at last.  Outside, the rain poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the garden and about the walls of that desolated old palace.  How that night comes back to me!  There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire.  It glowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorial flame.  Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all.  Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such life as his.  Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both of us at once—­that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope—­and we were like two clinging together on a spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything.  Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame had returned, ‘and in the book we read no more that night.’”

She gave the old line with a certain bitter humour, and with the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a glittering garment.  That ironical smile, worn through so many years, had gradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself.

Everett dropped his head upon his hand.  “How much you have cared!” he said.

“Ah, yes, I cared,” she replied, closing her eyes.  “You can’t imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to some one.”

Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor.  “I was not sure how much you wanted me to know,” he said.

“Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your face, when you came that day with Charley.  You are so like him, that it is almost like telling him himself.  At least, I feel now that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion.”

“And has he never known at all?” asked Everett, in a thick voice.

“Oh! never at all in the way that you mean.  Of course, he is accustomed to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn’t find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy.  He has a genuine fondness for every woman who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly.  I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries and the droll little sermons.  It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns.  It was his kindness that was hardest.”