“She is in there,” he said, pointing to a closed door, “when you see her you will understand.”

“But you will come, too?” she asked, hesitating.

He shook his head.  “Her heart is bleeding—­it’s a woman that she wants.”

Then he opened the door, and pushing her gently inside, closed it after her.

At first Gerty could see but faintly by the light of a lamp which smoked, but as she went quickly forward, Laura rose from the sofa upon which she had been lying, and came a step to meet her.

“Why did you come?  I didn’t want you—­I didn’t want anyone,” she said.

Before the hard tones of her voice, Gerty stood still, shrinking slightly away in her baffled splendour.  Her heart strained toward her friend, yet when she tried to think of some comforting word that she might utter, she found only a vacancy of scattered phrases.  What would words mean to Laura now?  What word among all others was there that she could speak to her?

For a moment, groping blindly for light, she hesitated; then her arms opened, and she caught Laura into them in spite of her feeble effort at resistance.

“Dearest! dearest! dearest!” she repeated, for she had found the word at last.

Partly because she was a woman and partly because of her bitter triumphs, she had understood that the wisdom in love is the only wisdom which avails in the supreme agony of life.  Neither philosophy nor religion mattered now, for presently she felt that her bosom was warm with tears, and when Laura lifted her head, the two women kissed in that intimate knowledge which is uttered without speech.

CHAPTER VI

RENEWAL

In that strange spiritual death—­which was still death though the members of her body lived—­Laura seemed to lose gradually all personal connection with the events through which she had passed; and when after three months she turned again to look back upon them, she found that they stood out, clear, detached, and remote as the incidents of history.  She was not only dead herself, but the whole world about her showed to her in a curious aspect of unreality, as if a thin veil obscured it, and there were moments when even Adams and Gerty seemed to her to be barely alive To the last she had refused to return to Gramercy Park, and on the night that she reached Gerty’s house she had been aware that she was slipping away from any actual contact with her former life.  Her body might breathe and move, but her soul and even her senses had become inanimate, and she felt that they had ceased to take part in any words she uttered.

Though she had persistently denied herself to her aunts, she sent for Mr. Payne on the first day that she was able to sit up, and the only softness she showed was in answer to the compassionate kiss he placed upon her forehead.

“My child, my child, what did I tell you?” he asked gently.