The eyes in his ghastly face closed wearily, then fluttered: 

“Awfully sorry, Valerie—­make such a mess—­in your house.”

“Oh-h—­Jose,” she sobbed.

After that they took him away to the Presbyterian Hospital; and nobody seemed to find very much the matter with him except that he’d been badly shocked.

But the next day all sensation ceased in his body from the neck downward.

And they told Valerie why.

For ten days he lay there, perfectly conscious, patient, good-humored, and his almond-shaped and hollow eyes rested on Valerie and Rita with a fatalistic serenity subtly tinged with irony.

John Burleson came to see him, and cried.  After he left, Querida said to Valerie: 

“John and I are destined to remain near neighbours; his grief is well meant, but a trifle premature.”

“You are not going to die, Jose!” she said gently.

But he only smiled.

Ogilvy came, Annan came, the Countess Helene, and even Mrs. Hind-Willet.  He inspected them all with his shadowy and mysterious smile, answered them gently deep in his sunken eyes a sombre amusement seemed to dwell.  But there was in it no bitterness.

Then Neville came.  Valerie and Rita were absent that day but their roses filled the private ward-room with a hint of the coming summer.

Querida lay looking at Neville, the half smile resting on his pallid face like a slight shadow that faintly waxed and waned with every breath he drew.

“Well,” he said quietly, “you are the man I wished to see.”

“Querida,” he said, deeply affected, “this thing isn’t going to be permanent—­”

“No; not permanent.  It won’t last, Neville.  Nothing does last.... unless you can tell me whether my pictures are going to endure.  Are they?  I know that you will be as honest with me as I was—­dishonest with you.  I will believe what you say.  Is my work destined to be permanent?”

“Don’t you know it is?”

“I thought so....  But you know.  Because, Neville, you are the man who is coming into what was mine, and what will be your own;—­and you are coming into more than that, Neville, more than I ever could have attained.  Now answer me; will my work live?”

“Always,” said Neville simply.

Querida smiled: 

“The rest doesn’t matter then....  Even Valerie doesn’t matter....  But you may hand me one of her roses....  No, a bud, if you don’t mind—­unopened.”

When it was time for Neville to go Querida’s smile had faded and the pink rose-bud lay wilted in his fingers.

“It is just as well, Neville,” he said.  “I couldn’t have endured your advent.  Somebody has to be first; I was—­as long as I lived....  It is curious how acquiescent a man’s mind becomes—­when he’s like this.  I never believed it possible that a man really could die without regret, without some shadow of a desire to live.  Yet it is that way, Neville....  But a man must lie dying before he can understand it.”