“I don’t know! I don’t know! That’s the inexplicable part of it. Yet it seems so near I can almost reach out my hands and grasp it. This feeling has been upon me all day, and grows stronger every moment. I never experienced anything like it before. I don’t know why or whence it comes, nor can I explain it well; but I feel it. Yes, I am very near to something good--near to happiness at last.” His voice sank low, and its tones had a thrilling sweetness, a holy joy. His companions listened in silence, under a spell, their astonishment too vast for words. This was strange talk to come from him. As in reverie he went on, after a pause, “All my life I have wondered how it would seem to be happy--really happy--if only for one hour. Misery I know well; but happiness and I have never met. Now, it is so near that I am already in its sunshine.” And he smiled, with the wonderful light on his face, and the smile was strangely sweet and beautiful. The Butterfly shook herself out of the seriousness that was upon her, and said: “You are going to have money--plenty of money--all unexpected as it comes in stories, and then--then you must give a big supper and Cartice and I will wear our prettiest gowns and be queens of the feast.” He looked at her and smiled again, but did not even hear her chatter, for his soul was revelling in soundless melody. The exaltation was still on his face when he and Chriss bade Cartice good-night. It was ten o’clock next day when Mrs. Doring reached the _Register_ office. The entrance was full of men, with frightened faces, one of whom motioned to her to stop. Obeying, she stood in her tracks, chilled with a sense of disaster, until he reached her. “You must not come in,” he said. “There has been an accident at the elevator, and--Prescott is dead.” In silence she turned away. “And this was the happiness he felt so near to him--this?” she gasped. “Yes; it was so near, yet he did not understand, and we did not understand. And it was this! It was this!” Prescott and death were irreconcilable. He was typical of life, force and action. Who could think of him as out of the conflict, as voiceless and silent? How could they ever learn to speak of him as one who was but is not? “Saw you nothing, Chrissalyn--nothing that portended this?” Cartice asked. “Nothing.” “Yet we had a sign, and were too blind to see it. His glorified face last night, and his strange feeling that happiness was near to him--these were signs, though we understood them not.” From the first a sense of the unreality of what had occurred came to Mrs. Doring and never left her. She followed the sable carriage of the dead to the cemetery, and returned to find his chair vacant, his pen idle, his presence gone forever, yet it was not like reality,--none of it. She shed no tears, nor was she sad. After the first startled moment she was at peace, though she knew not why.