“Oh, I can’t.  I wouldn’t let anybody do these things but me, for the whole world.”  Mrs. Lloyd was arranging flowers, tuberoses and white carnations, in vases, and the whole house was scented with them.  She looked ghastly, yet still unconquerably happy.  She had now no reason to conceal the ravages of disease, and her color was something frightful.  Still, she did not suffer as much, for her mind had overborne her body to such an extent that she had the mastery for the time, to a certain extent, of those excruciating stabs of pain.  People looked at her incredulously.  They could not believe that she felt as she talked, that she was as happy and resigned as she looked, but it was all true.  It was either an abnormal state into which her husband’s death had thrown her, or one too normal to be credited.  She looked at it all with a supreme childishness and simplicity.  She simply believed that her husband was in heaven, where she should join him; that he was beyond all suffering which might have come to him through her, and all that troubled her was the one consideration of his having been forced to leave his treasures of earth.  She looked at various things which had been prized by the dead man, and found her chief comfort in saying to the minister or Cynthia or Robert that Norman had loved these, but he would have that which was infinitely more precious.  She even gazed out of the window, that Tuesday night, and saw her nephew driving away with Ellen, and reflected, with pain, that her husband had been fond and proud of that bay.  She was a little at a loss to conceive what could make up to her husband for that in another world, but she succeeded, and evolved from her own loving fancy, and her recollection of the Old Testament, a conception of some wonderful creature, shod with thunder and maned with a whirlwind.  Her disease, and a drug she had been taking of late, stimulated her imagination to results of grotesque pathos, but she was comforted.

That night when they were alone, Robert turned to the girl at his side with a sudden motion.  It was no time for love-making, for that was in the mind of neither of them, but the bereavement of this other woman, and the tragedy of her state, filled him with a sort of protective pain towards the girl who might some time have to suffer through him the same loss.

“Are you all tired out, dear?” he said, and passed his free arm around her waist.

“No,” replied Ellen.  Then, since she was only a girl, and overwrought, having been through a severe strain, she broke down, and began to cry.

Robert drew her closer, and she hid her face on his shoulder.  “Poor little girl, it has been very hard for you,” he whispered.

“Oh, don’t think of me,” sobbed Ellen.  “But I can’t bear it, the way she acts and looks.  It is sadder than grief.”

“She is not going to live long herself, dear,” said Robert, in a stifled voice.

“And he—­did not know?”