Jean and I had been alone in our railway carriage for a great part of the journey; but an hour or two before we reached London a man got in and took a seat in a corner.  The train had stopped at a place where there is a beautiful and well-known cemetery.  People bring their friends from long distances to lay them there.  When one passes the station, one nearly always sees sad faces and people in mourning on the platform.

There was more than one group there that day, and the man who sat in the corner looked out at them with gentle eyes.  He had fine, deep eyes and a handsome mouth.  When the poor woman in mourning almost stumbled into the carriage, followed by her child, he put out his hand to help her and gave her his seat.  She had stumbled because her eyes were dim with dreadful crying, and she could scarcely see.  It made one’s heart stand still to see the wild grief of her, and her unconsciousness of the world about her.  The world did not matter.  There was no world.  I think there was nothing left anywhere but the grave she had just staggered blindly away from.  I felt as if she had been lying sobbing and writhing and beating the new turf on it with her poor hands, and I somehow knew that it had been a child’s grave she had been to visit and had felt she left to utter loneliness when she turned away.

It was because I thought this that I wished she had not seemed so unconscious of and indifferent to the child who was with her and clung to her black dress as if it could not bear to let her go.  This one was alive at least, even if she had lost the other one, and its little face was so wistful!  It did not seem fair to forget and ignore it, as if it were not there.  I felt as if she might have left it behind on the platform if it had not so clung to her skirt that it was almost dragged into the railway carriage with her.  When she sank into her seat she did not even lift the poor little thing into the place beside her, but left it to scramble up as best it could.  She buried her swollen face in her handkerchief and sobbed in a smothered way as if she neither saw, heard, nor felt any living thing near her.

How I wished she would remember the poor child and let it comfort her!  It really was trying to do it in its innocent way.  It pressed close to her side, it looked up imploringly, it kissed her arm and her crape veil over and over again, and tried to attract her attention.  It was a little, lily-fair creature not more than five or six years old and perhaps too young to express what it wanted to say.  It could only cling to her and kiss her black dress, and seem to beg her to remember that it, at least, was a living thing.  But she was too absorbed in her anguish to know that it was in the world.  She neither looked at nor touched it, and at last it sat with its cheek against her sleeve, softly stroking her arm, and now and then kissing it longingly.  I was obliged to turn my face away and look out of the window, because I knew the man with the kind face saw the tears well up into my eyes.