I stood by the bedside. I looked down on my wife's face. Just so I had seen it lie on the pillow beside me in the early morning when the wind and the dawn came up from beyond the sea. She did not look like one dead. Her lips were still red, and it seemed to me that a tinge of colour lay on her cheek. It seemed to me, too, that if I kissed her she would wake, and put her slight hand on my neck, and lay her cheek against mine--and that we should tell each other everything, and weep together, and understand and be comforted. So I stooped and laid my lips to hers as the old nurse stole from the room. But the red lips were like marble, and she did not wake. She will not wake now ever any more. I tell you again there are some things that cannot be written. III. I lay that night in a big room filled with heavy, dark furniture, in a great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains--a bed the counterpart of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last. They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most. I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me that it was I who had done that. The tall clock at the stairhead sounded the hours--eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was dark and very still. I had not been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the intoxication of grief--a real drunkenness, more merciful than the calm that comes after. Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought. And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been about two that I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the ticking of the clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet determined not to hear it, _because it came from the next room_--the room where the corpse lay.