“Ah! _not_ as I saw my mother--not that way, not that way!” He was deeply moved by my news--far more moved, I perceived, than he would have been the day before: it gave me a vivid sense that, as I had then said to myself, there was indeed a relation between them and that he had actually been face to face with her. Such an idea, by its reassertion of his extraordinary privilege, would have suddenly presented him as painfully abnormal had he not so vehemently insisted on the difference. “I saw her living--I saw her to speak to her--I saw her as I see you now!” It is remarkable that for a moment, though only for a moment, I found relief in the more personal, as it were, but also the more natural of the two phenomena. The next, as I embraced this image of her having come to him on leaving me and of just what it accounted for in the disposal of her time, I demanded with a shade of harshness of which I was aware--“What on earth did she come for?” He had now had a minute to think--to recover himself and judge of effects, so that if it was still with excited eyes he spoke he showed a conscious redness and made an inconsequent attempt to smile away the gravity of his words. “She came just to see me. She came--after what had passed at your house--so that we _should_, after all, at last meet. The impulse seemed to me exquisite, and that was the way I took it.” I looked round the room where she had been--where she had been and I never had been. “And was the way you took it the way she expressed it?” “She only expressed it by being here and by letting me look at her. That was enough!” he exclaimed with a singular laugh. I wondered more and more. “You mean she didn’t speak to you?” “She said nothing. She only looked at me as I looked at her.” “And _you_ didn’t speak either?” He gave me again his painful smile. “I thought of _you_. The situation was every way delicate. I used the finest tact. But she saw she had pleased me.” He even repeated his dissonant laugh. “She evidently pleased you!” Then I thought a moment. “How long did she stay?” “How can I say? It seemed twenty minutes, but it was probably a good deal less.” “Twenty minutes of silence!” I began to have my definite view and now in fact quite to clutch at it. “Do you know you’re telling me a story positively monstrous?” He had been standing with his back to the fire; at this, with a pleading look, he came to me. “I beseech you, dearest, to take it kindly.” I could take it kindly, and I signified as much; but I couldn’t somehow, as he rather awkwardly opened his arms, let him draw me to him. So there fell between us for an appreciable time the discomfort of a great silence. VI He broke it presently by saying: “There’s absolutely no doubt of her death?” “Unfortunately none. I’ve just risen from my knees by the bed where they’ve laid her out.” He fixed his eyes hard on the floor; then he raised them to mine. “How does she look?” “She looks--at peace.”