The wind is changing, and the sun hides his face decently behind a great white cloud. There is a hoarse rattle in his throat, and his breathing is difficult. The doctor comes and stands quietly behind her; the crowd at the gate above gets denser; the servants huddle together in the dining-room and cry. The Swedish gardener pats them all in turn, but most gently the fat housemaid. A sudden blast of wind blows a strand of her hair loose and it touches his lips, and he mutters, "My little one!" She lifts her face and looks at him; a strange purple color vibration is waving over his face, and she calls affrightedly,-- "Dear, oh dear man, look at me! Can you see me, do you know me?" He lifts his heavy lids and looks at her steadily with half-dead eyes, and says with stiff, barely articulate speech: "Of course I do, my dearie! I'm all rig--" She feels his fingers close more tightly over hers,--once, twice,--then relax; his chin falls, and the doctor passes his hand over his eye-lids and puts a handkerchief to his lips; and the cow-girl drops with a cry to the ground and throws her apron over her head; and at the gate above a child calls "Mammy!" in frightened tones; and the lad who has been sitting up on the slope at the foot of the flag-staff slides the Union Jack half-mast; and the big white house is without a master. * * * * * She is sitting in an old garden, a retired place in the village, right on the fjord. They have driven her down there away from the house that seems haunted by his spirit, infected with the loathsome odor of rapid dissolution that nothing can overcome, that seems to ooze out and taint the very flowers. And then the myriad flies that crawl and creep, as if sick or drunk, over everything, and make one loathe and turn from the very sight of food and drink, for dread of where they have been; make one long to scream hysterically to drown their hateful buzzing, and rush away and plunge into the sea,--were it not that it too seems to whisper in undertones of dead men and lost sweethearts, drowned mariners with swollen gray-green faces and tangled locks floating like sea-sedge behind them, as they toss on the swift undercurrents beneath its treacherous smiling surface.