Impelled by a physical curiosity, she lifted the sheet and scrutinised John’s breast, so pallid against the dark red of his neck, and bent down to catch the last tired efforts of the heart within.  And the idea of her extraordinary intimacy with this man, of the incessant familiarity of more than twenty years, struck her and overwhelmed her.  She saw that nothing is so subtly influential as constant uninterrupted familiarity, nothing so binding, and perhaps nothing so sacred.  It was a trifle that they had not loved.  They had lived.  Ah! she knew him so profoundly that words could not describe her knowledge.  He kept his own secrets, hundreds of them; and he had, in a way, astounded and shocked her by his suicide.  Yet, in another way, this miserable termination did not at all surprise her; and his secrets were petty, factual things of no essential import, which left her mystic omniscience of him unimpaired.

She looked at his eyes, and thought pitifully:  ’These eyes cannot see that I uncover him.’  Then she looked again at his breast, which heaved in shallow respirations.  And at the moment he exhaled a sigh, so softly delicate and gentle that it might have been the sigh of an infant sinking to sleep.  She put her ear quickly to the still breast, as to a sea-shell, and listened intently, and caught no rumour of life there.  Startled, she glanced at the jaw, which had dropped, and then at Ethel dozing on the sofa.

The room was filled for her with the majestic sound of trumpets, loud, sustained, and thrilling, but heard only by the soul; a noble and triumphant fanfare announcing the awful advent of those forces which are beyond the earthly sense.  John’s body lay suddenly deserted and residual; that deceitful brain, and that lying tongue, and that murderous hand had already begun to decay; and the informing fragment of eternal and universal energy was gone to its next manifestation and its next task, unconscious, irresponsible, and unchanged.  The ineptitude of human judgments had been once more emphasised, and the great excellence of charity.

‘Ethel,’ said Leonora timorously, waking with a touch the young and beautiful girl whose flushed cheek was pressed against the cushion of the sofa.  ‘He’s gone....  Call Fred.’

CHAPTER XI

THE REFUSAL

Fifteen months after John’s death, and the inquest on his body, and the clandestine funeral, Leonora sat alone one evening in the garden of the house at Hillport.  She wore a black dress trimmed with jet; a narrow band of white muslin clasped her neck, and from her shoulders hung a long thin antique gold chain, once the ornament of Aunt Hannah.  Her head was uncovered, and the mild breeze which stirred the new leaves of the poplars moved also the stray locks of her hair.  Her calm and mature beauty was unchanged; it was a common remark in the town that during the past year she had looked handsomer than ever, more