Stupid with distress and pain, my heart was choked. I stared blankly in return, the channels of speech too blocked to find a single syllable. I raised my hands, though hardly knowing what I meant to do. She sat up in the chair and looked a moment swiftly about the room. Her lips parted for another question, but it did not come. I think in my face, or in my gesture perhaps, she read the message of despair. She hid her face behind her hands, leaned back with a dreadful drooping of the entire frame, and let a sigh escape her that held the substance of all unutterable words of grief. I yearned to help, but it was my silence, of course, that brought the truth so swiftly home to her returning consciousness. The awakening was complete and rapid, not as out of common sleep. I longed to touch and comfort her, yet my muscles refused to yield in any action I could manage, and my tongue clung dry against the roof of my mouth. Then, presently, between her fingers came the words below a whisper: “I knew that this would happen ... I knew that once I slept, he’d go from me ... and I should lose him. I tried ... that hard ... to keep awake.... But sleep _would_ take me. An’ now ... it’s took him ... too. He’s gone for--for very long ... again!” She did not say “for ever.” It was the voice, the accent and the words again of Mrs. LeVallon. “Not for ever,” I whispered, “but for a little time.” She rose up like a figure of white death, taking my hand. She did not tremble, and her step was firm. And more than this I never heard her say, for the entire contents of the interval since she first fell asleep beneath her husband’s passes had gone beyond recall. “Take me to him,” she said gently. “I want to say good-bye.” I led her up those creaking wooden stairs and left her with her dead. Her strength was wonderful. I can never forget the quiet self-control she showed through all the wretched details that the situation then entailed. She asked no questions, shed no tears, moving brave and calm through all the ghastly duties. Something in her that lay deeper than death understood, and with the resignation of a truly great heart, accepted. Far stronger than myself she was; and, indeed, it seemed that my pain for her--at the time anyhow--absorbed the suffering that made my own heart ache with a sense of loss that has ever since left me empty and bereaved. Only in her eyes was there betrayal of sorrow that was itself, perhaps, another half revival of yet dimmer memories ... “eyes in which desire of some strange thing unutterably burned, unquenchable....” For the first time I understood the truth of another’s words--so like a statue was her appearance, so set in stone, her words so sparing and her voice so dead: