It seemed to him that every tenderness he had shown his wife was drowning out of his consciousness. But every hard thing he had ever done rose and rolled upon him--an unkind look, a harsh word, a little neglect here, a certain indifference there; an occasion when he had made her miserable and could just as easily have made her happy; a time when she had asked--Jean so seldom asked--for some trifling attention which he had omitted to bestow; the desolate look she wore on a given day; the patient eyes she lifted, heart-sick with sore surprise, once when he ... The worst of it was in thinking how it was when she began to be weak and ill. Jean was not a complaining woman, never a whining invalid, but resolute, sweet, and cheerful. Like an air-plant on oxygen, she existed on his tenderness. He had offered it to her when he felt like it. Well, busy, bustling man--out of his bounteous health and freedom, what comfort had he given to this imprisoned woman? The passing of his moods? The attention of his whims? The fragments of his time? The blunt edge of his sympathy? One night he had come in late, when he could quite as well have come two hours before; he found her by the open window, gasping for breath in the cold night air, in her blue gown, with her braided hair, her lovely look, the dear expression in her eyes. She had not reproached him ... he wished from his soul, now, that she _had_ reproached him, sometimes; it would have done him good; it would have dashed cold water on his fainting sense of duty to her; he was the kind of man who would have responded to it like a man. But she was not the kind of woman to do it. And she never had. So he had slid into those easy habits of accepting the invalid, anyhow; as a fact not to be put too much in the foreground of his daily life ... not to intrude too much. And she had not protested, had not cried out against the frost that gathered in his heart. She had trodden her _via dolorosa_ alone. As she had endured, so she had died. He thought that if he had only been with her then, he could have borne it all. His mind veered off from this swiftly, almost as if it were unhinged, and began to dwell upon what he would do for her if he had her again, living, warm, breathing, sweet. The only comfort he could get was in thinking how he would comfort her ... now; how he would cherish her ... now; the love he would waste, the tenderness he would invent--new forms of it, that no husband in the world had ever thought of, to make a wife happy. Oh, the honor in which he would hold her least and lightest wish! The summer of the heart in which she should blossom!--she who had perished in the winter of his neglect; she who was under the catafalque of autumn leaves out there in the gathering November storm. Terrible that it should storm the first night that Jean lay in her grave! "God! God!" he cried. "If I could have her back for one hour--for one _instant_!"