have we eyes for, if not to envisage them?  Do so fearlessly, honestly, with a clean heart, and, man or woman, you can only be the better for it.’  Perhaps his system was a shade too simple, a shade too obvious, for this complicated planet; but he held to it in all sincerity.  It was in pursuance of the same system, I daresay, that he taught Nina to fence, and to read Latin and Greek, as well as to play the piano, and turn an omelette.  She could ply a foil against the best of us.

And then, quite suddenly, he died.

I think it was in March, or April; anyhow it was a premature spring-like day, and he had left off his overcoat.  That evening he went to the Odeon, and when, after the play he joined us for supper at the Bleu, he said he thought he had caught a cold, and ordered hot grog.  The next day he did not turn up at all; so several of us, after dinner, presented ourselves at his lodgings in Montparnasse.  We found him in bed, with Nina reading to him.  He was feverish, and Nina had insisted that he should stop at home.  He would be all right to-morrow.  He scoffed at our suggestion that he should see a doctor; he was one of those men who affect to despise the medical profession.  But early on the following morning a commissionnaire brought me a note from Nina.  ‘My father is very much worse.  Can you come at once?’ He was delirious.  Poor Nina, white, with frightened eyes, moved about like one distracted.  We sent off for Dr. Renoult, we had in a Sister of Charity.  Everything that could be done was done.  Till the very end, none of us for a moment doubted that he would recover.  It was impossible to conceive that that strong, affirmative life could be extinguished.  And even after the end had come, the end with its ugly suite of material circumstances, I don’t think any of us realised what it meant.  It was as if we had been told that one of the forces of Nature had become inoperative.  And Nina, through it all, was like some pale thing in marble, that breathed and moved:  white, dazed, helpless, with aching, incredulous eyes, suffering everything, understanding nothing.

When it came to the worst of the dreadful necessary businesses that followed, some of us somehow, managed to draw her from the death-chamber into another room, and to keep her there, while others of us got it over.  It was snowing that afternoon, I remember, a melancholy, hesitating snowstorm, with large moist flakes that fluttered down irresolutely, and presently disintegrated into rain; but we had not far to go.  Then we returned to Nina, and for many days and nights we never dared to leave her.  You will guess whether the question of her future, especially of her immediate future, weighed heavily upon our minds.  In the end, however, it appeared to have solved itself—­though I can’t pretend that the solution was exactly all we could have wished.