“Ah, Mary! Mary!” She opened her eyes again: she was much too tired to be frightened of death. God takes the ignorant, plucky souls who have fought the good fight, not quite knowing why, very peacefully to Himself. “I should like,” she gasped, “more air.” The nurse came towards her bed with the fan in her hand, but before she could reach her a gust of wind strangely cool and fresh swung the curtains of the window, and Mary Huntly was dead, having passed from a life which stifled, limited and kept back all the highest and noblest in her to beyond the horizon where “Over all this weary world of ours breathes diviner air.” The room was very quiet and still. The doctor after a few words to the nurse, engaging her for another case, went off to his quarters. Gladys composed two heart-broken notes to Jack Hurstly in her sleep, and Tom Huntly left alone with the body of the woman he loved fought the old fight with the grimness of things. CHAPTER XXVI “And Memory fed the Soul of Love with tears.” “TOO late!” is a phrase holding the eternal knell of life. It sounds like a muffled peal even to those who hear it lightly said. To those who have lived through it, the worst of the battle passes before their eyes again. Many, perhaps blissfully, miss all that it means. They dare not, or cannot, face remorse. That they themselves have pulled down their house about their ears seems to them an infamous impossibility. They forget all their own cruel words, long neglect and unfair judgment, and only remember flashes of sunlight which they connect—probably quite falsely—with themselves. Their “yesterdays look backward with a smile.” Gladys never realized even as much as a tinge of shame. She cried a great deal. Mary knew how to manage things so beautifully, and, better still how to manage Tom. There was a certain heavy awkwardness about Tom that Gladys didn’t like. It had the effect of putting her in the wrong, which was, on the face of it, absurd. Also he wouldn’t do what she wished without coarsely asking “Why.” Altogether, Mary had taken the edge off a difficulty; and Gladys hated difficulties almost as much as she did explanations. It was so dreadfully trying, too—Mary’s dying just then! Another week, perhaps, and it would not have mattered so much. The thought forced her to look into the glass. The crying had done no great damage; she would dress entirely in white. Jack would come round soon after breakfast to find out how Mary was. Oh, poor Mary! There was something so bald and primitive and earnest about death; _whatever_ happened she would not be taken to see the body. She went out into the dining-room. Suddenly she began to be afraid of meeting Tom.