A week later Adeline died. The cold she caught under the elms developed into pneumonia. She was a creature all nerves and no muscle. _I_ know that her conscience killed her. She was dead. Dead in the June days, which had suddenly turned hot and yellow. Dead! lying rigid under the brooding thatch eaves where the birds built. Lying cold and unresponsive to birds, flowers, sun, love--all the things which had moved her to hot, mournful passion. Almost her last words were, “Life has been lovely, lovely.” Then with a little haunting flicker of anxiety, memory, and fear on that face which already seemed to belong to some other world, she added faintly, “You’ll put it in the paper?” James Pray, broken-hearted, sent off the notice. It had been only a freak, of course; one of the whimsical, morbid ideas which she had in such plenty. But it was sacred. It was such a hideously little while since the afternoon under the elms. She had looked so haggardly beautiful. He remembered everything--down to a green caterpillar which crawled on her hair. Next day he walked into the village and bought a copy of the newspaper, and brought it home and spread it out on the oak table in front of him. “I wonder why?” he said, in a voice choked by tenderness, and then he went up to her. Their bedroom, like the rest of the cottage, spoke of the persistent struggle for individuality. The bed was a tent, with curtains and canopy of brown and white; old chintz the color of coffee which is three parts milk. There was a patchwork quilt. She had made it from sentiment, not industry. There was the shine of oak and the twinkle of metal about the furniture. The chairs had rush seats, and had been collected, one by one, from other cottages. He sat down and looked at the figure which was stretched so quietly under the canopy of sad brown. I try to picture him as he sat in that room with his unconventional clothes--you know the sort of thing, velvet coat, baggy knickerbockers, and streaming ends of a vivid necktie--and rugged, simple face; he might have been a man of a hundred years back. He could have had no place in this whirling, struggling nineteenth century, this common age. The cuckoo was calling, with a voice much the worse for wear, “Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuck-cuck-cuckoo, cuckoo, cuck. Cuck.” He groaned, remembering that she would never hear a word against the cuckoo--that genus of birds who scorned dull routine and domesticity. She used to add a bit mournfully, with one of those fierce sudden kisses which had bothered him so at the time, and which he would have given all his art for now, that a cuckoo sort of woman would have suited him. She filled the world--this dead, perplexing Adeline of his. Would he ever be able to touch or hear, or speak, or see without that tender, pensive ghost at his side!