“Back!—­All of you!” commanded the low, clear voice of Edgar Poe, as with the dear burden still in his arms he sank gently to the floor and propping her head in his lap, disposed her limbs in comfortable, and her dress in orderly manner.  “Back—­don’t crowd!  A doctor!”

One of the guests from nearby, who knew the neighborhood, had already slipped from the door and gone to fetch the nearest doctor.  The others sat and listened for his step in breathless stillness.

Edgar Poe bent his marble face above the prostrate form of his wife, calling to her in endearing whispers while, with his handkerchief he wiped from her lips the oozing, crimson stream.  His teeth chattered.  Once before he had seen such a stream.  It was long ago—­long ago, but he remembered it well.  He was back—­a little boy, a mere baby—­in the small, dark room behind Mrs. Fipps’ millinery shop, in Richmond, and a stream like this came from the lips of his mother who lay so still, so white, upon the bed.  And his mother had been dying.  He had seen her thus—­he would see her nevermore!...  Would the doctor never come?—­

* * * * *

Many days the Angel of Death spread his wings over the cottage in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.  Their shadow cast a great stillness upon the cottage.  Outside was a white, silent world.  Snow had fallen—­snow on snow—­until it lay deep, deep upon the garden-spot and deep in the streets outside.  There was no wind and the ice-sheathed trees that were as sentinels round about the cottage stood still.  They seemed to listen and to wait.

Inside, in the bed-chamber upstairs, under the shelving walls of the low Dutch roof, The Dreamer’s heartsease blossom lay broken and wan upon the white bed.  It was a very white little blossom and the dark eyes seemed darker, larger than ever before as they looked out from the pale face.  But they had never seemed so soft and a smile like an angel’s played now and again about her lips.

Beside her, with his lips pressed upon the tiny white hand which he held in both his own was the bowed figure of a man—­of a poet and a lover who like the ice-sheathed trees seemed to listen and to wait—­of a man whose countenance from being pale was become ghastly, whose eyes from being luminous were wild with a “divine despair.”

At the foot of the bed sat a silver-haired woman with saintlike face uplifted in resignation and aspiration.  For once the busy hands were idle and were clasped in her lap.  She too, listened and waited, as she had listened and waited for days.  Oh Love!  Oh Life!  Are these the happy trio who lived for each other only in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass?

The silence was only broken when the lips of the invalid moved to murmur some loving words or to babble of the flowers in the Valley.  She was in no pain but she was very tired.  She was not unhappy, for the two whom she loved and who loved her were with her and though she was tired she soon would rest—­in Heaven.  When she spoke of going the man’s heart stood still with terror.  He held the hand closer and pressed his lips more fiercely upon it.