separation of Rutherford and Betty Ochiltree, which began on the day of their marriage, is coming to an end, and Hilda's death removes the final impediment. Together they pay a last visit to the dead woman: Incapable of speech, he lifted a tress of hair--flowing free over the rigid arms, because it was really pretty, and thus had to be made the most of--and pressed it a moment to his bearded mouth. In that gesture he seemed to ask her forgiveness for having been a man like other men, as Nature made them. 'Kiss _her_,' Betty whispered, pushing him a little. She, too, felt that it would be something, if not much, to put to the account that was so frightfully ill-balanced--a kiss from Rutherford before all was wholly over. He stooped and laid his lips--scarcely laid them--on the waxen forehead. And he thought how he had nearly kissed her once, in the scented spring dusk, at her father's gate, and been repelled at the last moment by the thought of something that he could not see.... He turned back the sheet and straightened it, and nobody but hired undertakers had anything more to do with Hilda Donne. He put out the lamps, leaving her in the dark, which, as a living, nervous woman, she had always been afraid of; and he took Betty in his arms to comfort her a little, before he opened the door upon the light and life of their own transfigured world. There is a characteristic vein of realism in the subsequent view of the lovers' self-absorption and short-lived sorrow, and the callousness of Donne.