Presently he put it down, and came back into his wife's room. He shut the windows, for he shivered with cold, and stared about. The empty bed was made, straight and stark. The violets were drooping on the table beside her Bible, her basket, and her portfolio. He picked these things up, and laid them down again. He went mechanically to the bureau and opened the upper drawer. All her little dainty belongings were folded in their places,--her gloves, her handkerchiefs, the laces that she fancied, and the blond ribbons that she wore--the blue, the rose, the lavender, and the corn. In this drawer a long narrow piece of white tissue-paper lay folded carefully across the glove box. He opened it idly. Something fell from it and seemed to leap to his fingers, and cling as if it would not leave them. It was a thick lock of her own long bright hair. He caught it to his breast, his cheek, his lips. He cherished it wildly, as he would now have cherished her. The forgotten tenderness, the omitted gentleness of life, lavished itself on death, as remorse will lavish what love passed by. The touch of her hair on his hands smote the retreating form of his illusion out of him. He could not deceive himself any longer. "Jean _is_ dead," he said distinctly. He threw himself down on her lounge and tried to collect himself, as he would for any other event of life--that he might meet it manfully. "She is really dead," he repeated. "I have got to live without her, ... and those children ... no mother. I must arouse myself. I must bear it, as other men do." Even as the words turned themselves like poisoned wires through his mind the conviction that his sorrow was not like the sorrow of other men rushed upon him. What had he done to her? Oh, what had he been to her--his poor Jean? He turned his head and thrust his face into the depths of her blue pillow. A delicate breath stole from it--the violet perfume that Jean used about her bedroom because he fancied it. He sprang from the lounge, and began to pace the room madly to and fro. Now there rose about him, wave by wave, like the rising of an awful tide, the overlooked but irresistible force of the common life which married man and woman share--incidents that he would rather have died than recall, words, looks, scenes, which it shattered his soul and body to remember. A solemn sea, they widened and spread about him. He felt himself torn from his feet and tossed into the surge of them.