He had lifted his head toward the light, while he ran his hand through his hair, and again she saw the look, so like spiritual exaltation, transfigure his face.  Before this man, who had sprung from poverty and dirt, who had struggled up by his own force, overcoming and triumphing, fighting and winning, fighting and holding, fighting and losing, but always fighting—­before this man, who had been born in a cellar, she felt suddenly humbled.  Without friends, without knowledge, except the bitter knowledge of the streets, he had fought his fight, and had kept untarnished a certain hardy standard of honour.  Beside this tremendous achievement she weighed his roughness, his ignorance of books and of the superficial conventions, and she realized how little these things really mattered—­how little any outside things mattered in the final judgment of life.  She thought of George, dying a drunkard’s death in the room at the end of the hail—­of George whose way had been smoothed for him from birth, who had taken everything that he had wanted.

“I wish there was something I could do for you—­something to help you,” she said impetuously.  “But I never saw any one who seemed to need help so little.”

His face brightened, and she saw that her words had brought a touching wistfulness into his eyes.

“Well, if you’d let me come and talk to you sometimes” he answered shyly.  “There’re a lot of things I’d like to talk to you about—­things I don’t know, things I do know, and things I half know.”

From the brilliant look she turned on him, he understood that he must have given her pleasure, and she saw the smile return to his face.

“I’ll tell you everything I know and welcome,” she replied readily; “but that isn’t much.  Better than that, I’ll read to you.”

“If you don’t mind, I think I’d rather you’d just talk.”  Then he rose with one of his abrupt movements, “I’d better look in again now.  The nurse might want something.”

“I feel that you oughtn’t to stay up,” urged Gabriella, rising as he turned away from her.  “You have done all you can.”

His only response was an impatient negative gesture, and without looking at her, he crossed the room quickly and went out into the hall.  Hardly a minute had passed, and she was still standing where he had left her, when he returned and said in a whisper: 

“He is going now—­very quietly.  Will you come?”

She shook her head, crying out sharply:  “No! no!” Then before something in his face her opposition melted swiftly away, and she added:  “Yes, I’ll come.  He might like to have some one by him who knew him as he used to be.”

“After all, he got the worst of it, poor devil!” he answered gently as he opened the door.

By a miracle of memory her resentment was swept out of her thoughts, and she was conscious of an infinite pity.  In George’s face, while she watched it, there flickered back for an instant the glory of that enchanted spring when she had first loved him.  Of his brilliant promise, his ardent youth, there remained only this fading glimmer in the face of a man who was dying.  And it seemed to her suddenly that she saw embodied in this wreck of youth and love all the inscrutable mystery not of death, but of life.  Her tears fell quickly, and while they fell O’Hara’s grasp enfolded her hand.