The Gabrilowitsches were by this time in Europe, and Clemens cabled them not to come.  Later in the day he asked me if we would be willing to close our home for the winter and come to Stormfield.  He said that he should probably go back to Bermuda before long; but that he wished to keep the house open so that it would be there for him to come to at any time that he might need it.

We came, of course, for there was no thought among any of his friends but for his comfort and peace of mind.  Jervis Langdon was summoned from Elmira, for Jean would lie there with the others.

In the loggia stood the half-trimmed Christmas tree, and all about lay the packages of gifts, and in Jean’s room, on the chairs and upon her desk, were piled other packages.  Nobody had been forgotten.  For her father she had bought a handsome globe; he had always wanted one.  Once when I went into his room he said: 

“I have been looking in at Jean and envying her.  I have never greatly envied any one but the dead.  I always envy the dead.”

He told me how the night before they had dined together alone; how he had urged her to turn over a part of her work to me; how she had clung to every duty as if now, after all the years, she was determined to make up for lost time.

While they were at dinner a telephone inquiry had come concerning his health, for the papers had reported him as returning from Bermuda in a critical condition.  He had written this playful answer: 

    Manager associated press,
    New York.

    I hear the newspapers say I am dying.  The charge is not true.  I
    would not do such a thing at my time of life.  I am behaving as good
    as I can.

    Merry Christmas to everybody!  Mark twain.

Jean telephoned it for him to the press.  It had been the last secretary service she had ever rendered.

She had kissed his hand, he said, when they parted, for she had a severe cold and would not wish to impart it to him; then happily she had said good night, and he had not seen her again.  The reciting of this was good to him, for it brought the comfort of tears.

Later, when I went in again, he was writing: 

“I am setting it down,” he said—­“everything.  It is a relief to me to write it.  It furnishes me an excuse for thinking.”

He continued writing most of the day, and at intervals during the next day, and the next.

It was on Christmas Day that they went with Jean on her last journey.  Katie Leary, her baby nurse, had dressed her in the dainty gown which she had worn for Clara’s wedding, and they had pinned on it a pretty buckle which her father had brought her from Bermuda, and which she had not seen.  No Greek statue was ever more classically beautiful than she was, lying there in the great living-room, which in its brief history had seen so much of the round of life.