A dark flush burnt its way up to the black, straight hair.

“She is—­dead,” Callender replied, with a hopeless pause before the hopeless word.

“Dead!” I echoed, unable to associate the idea of death with the incarnation of life that I remembered.

Callender did not reply.  He rose, with the slight limp so familiar to me in the past, but which I noticed now as if I had never seen it before, and went to a desk at the far end of the spacious room.  I smoked on meditatively.  It was odd, I thought, that chance had guided me straight as an arrow, to the cause of the change in my friend.  One might have known, though, that he, the misogynist of our class, would have come to grief, sooner or later, over a woman.  They always end by that.

I heard him unlocking a drawer, turning over some papers, and presently he limped back to his chair, bringing a heavy envelope.  He took from it a photograph, which he gave to me in silence.  Yes, that was she, yet not the same—­oh! not the same—­as when I had seen her the few times four years ago.  These solemn eyes were looking into the eyes of death, and the face, frightfully emaciated, yet so young and brave, sunk in the rich masses of hair.  It was too pitiful.

Callender had taken a package of manuscript from the envelope; the long supple fingers were busy among the leaves, and he bent his head to see the numbered pages.  At last, having arranged them in order, he leaned back again in his chair, holding the papers tenderly in his hand.  There was nothing of the poseur in Callender; his childlike simplicity of manner invested him with a touching dignity even though he owned himself vanquished, where another man would have faced life more bravely, nor have held it entirely worthless because of one narrow grave which shut forever from the light a woman who had never loved him.

“I think you would like to read this,” he said at length.  “And I would like to have you.  To her, it cannot matter.  I wanted to marry her, toward the end, so I could take care of her.—­She was poor, you know—­but she would not consent.  She left me this, without any message.  I knew her so well, she thought it would be easier for me to forget her; but now I shall never forget her.”

He gave me the little package of leaves, whose rough edges showed that they had been hurriedly cut from a binding, and then he fell again into his old lethargic attitude.  I am not an imaginative man, but a faint odor from the paper brought like a flash to my mind the brilliant, mutinous face, radiant with color and life, that I had seen last across a sea of white shoulders and black coats at a reception a few weeks before I went to South America.  The writing was the hurried, illegible hand of an author.  I thought grimly that I had probably chanced upon a much weakened and Americanized Marie Bashkirtseff, for though I had only been home a few weeks, it goes without saying that I had read a part at least of the ill-fated young Russian’s dairy.  Yet in the presence of the grief-stricken face, outlined against the dark leather chair-back, I felt a pang of shame at a thought bordering on levity.  There was indeed one likeness:  both were the unexpurgated records of hearts laid ruthlessly bare; both were instinct with life:  in every line one could feel the warm blood throbbing.