Hugh came as near to the daybed as he dared. Even then Ariel did not look up. She was intent on Grandam’s sleeping face. He noticed how tiny gold freckles stood out on her cheeks and nose, freckles that the silvery tone of her skin generally concealed but which were shown up now by pallor. Her hair, as in “The Shell,” was bent back from her temples,—only now by the air of Death, not of the sea, Hugh thought. And to him, still under the power and beauty of “The Shell,” she seemed a figure watching at the edge of the tide of death, wondering how high it would come, how close to her watching eyes, her folded hands. Grandam was sleeping with apparent comfort and tranquillity, her face, airily and delicately mysterious, a face that in its elusive quality had somehow escaped all the marks of the usual human experiences—old age, fear, and now even Death. Hugh ever since he was grown up, and much more since his father’s death, had realized Grandam’s uniqueness. Her only son, Hugh’s father, had been her last great love left to her, but when he went Grandam had remained as now, elusive of suffering. It was when his father died, or soon after, that Grandam gave herself away to Hugh in confidences, and ever since the already close bond of sympathy between them had been closer. She had reminded Hugh that she had married a man twenty years older than herself. His friends had become her friends; he had a genius for friendship and the men and women he knew intimately and had drawn to himself were people of rich lives, spiritually and intellectually. Among them were poets and painters, saints and humanitarians. Their values were spiritual. Grandam married when she was seventeen. Hugh’s father was born when she was twenty; and that same year her husband died. But in those three short years of a perfect marriage Grandam had made herself as accepted and loved by her husband’s circle of rare friends as he was himself.... “My love identified me with him. That is the only way I can explain such a miracle,” she told Hugh, that one brief hour some time in the course of their coming together in grief for his father’s death. But she never felt worthy of the remarkable friendships. She knew, none better, that she must fly, race, to keep up with her husband’s friends and himself in their flight through time and in Eternity. “The one who has helped me most in this flight, this race, is the possessor of those hands.” She indicated the drawing of the hands from which Hugh had never known her to be separated, whether at home or traveling. Wherever Grandam was, there always in her bedroom hung the ebony-framed drawing. “He taught me short cuts. After Hugh died (her husband Hugh, she meant) I would have lost the race if it hadn’t been for ‘The Saint.’ For if Hugh was so far ahead of me in Time here, in Eternity he would be lost—like a star shot into space. But ‘The Saint’ made me have faith that there are ways of keeping in touch even with shooting stars.