“So the Voice gave a funny little laugh almost like a woman’s hysterics, and I stopped crying right off short, and the Voice said, just a little bit mockingly:  ’But the only perfectly true story that I know—­the only story that’s never—­never been told to anybody before is the story of my life.’  ‘Very well, then,’ I said, ’tell me that!  Of course I was planning to live to be very old and learn a little about a great many things; but as long as apparently I’m not going to live to even reach my twenty-ninth birthday—­to-morrow—­you don’t know how unutterably it would comfort me to think that at least I knew everything about some one thing!’

“And then the Voice choked again, just a little bit, and said:  ’Well—­here goes, then.  Once upon a time—­but first, can you move your right hand?  Turn it just a little bit more this way.  There!  Cuddle it down!  Now, you see, I’ve made a little home for it in mine.  Ouch!  Don’t press down too hard!  I think my wrist is broken.  All ready, then?  You won’t cry another cry?  Promise?  All right then.  Here goes.  Once upon a time—­’

“Never mind about the story,” said the Youngish Girl tersely.  “It began about the first thing in all his life that he remembered seeing—­something funny about a grandmother’s brown wig hung over the edge of a white piazza railing—­and he told me his name and address, and all about his people, and all about his business, and what banks his money was in, and something about some land down in the Panhandle, and all the bad things that he’d ever done in his life, and all the good things, that he wished there’d been more of, and all the things that no one would dream of telling you if he ever, ever expected to see Daylight again—­things so intimate—­things so—­

“But it wasn’t, of course, about his story that I wanted to tell you.  It was about the ‘home,’ as he called it, that his broken hand made for my—­frightened one.  I don’t know how to express it; I can’t exactly think, even, of any words to explain it.  Why, I’ve been all over the world, I tell you, and fairly loafed and lolled in every conceivable sort of ease and luxury, but the Soul of me—­the wild, restless, breathless, discontented soul of me—­never sat down before in all its life—­I say, until my frightened hand cuddled into his broken one.  I tell you I don’t pretend to explain it, I don’t pretend to account for it; all I know is—­that smothering there under all that horrible wreckage and everything—­the instant my hand went home to his, the most absolute sense of serenity and contentment went over me.  Did you ever see young white horses straying through a white-birch wood in the springtime?  Well, it felt the way that looks!—­Did you ever hear an alto voice singing in the candle-light?  Well, it felt the way that sounds!  The last vision you would like to glut your eyes on before blindness smote you!  The last sound you would like to glut your ears on before deafness dulled you!  The last touch—­before Intangibility!  Something final, complete, supreme—­ineffably satisfying!