It was in August, in a sweltering heat which made itself felt even beside the Maine sea, that a telegram came from Clive Reinhard, very brief but none the less disturbing. "Your husband here ill--better come." The telegram was dated from Caromneck,--Reinhard's place on the Sound.... By the time Milly had made the long journey her husband was dead. Reinhard met her at the station in his car. She always remembered afterwards that gravelly patch before the station, with its rows of motor-cars waiting for the men about to arrive from the city on the afternoon trains, and Reinhard's dark little face, which did not smile at her approach. "He was sick when he came out," he explained brusquely; "don't believe he ever got over that last attack of grippe.... It was pneumonia: the doctor said his heart was too weak." It was the commonplace story of the man working at high pressure, often under stimulants, who has had the grippe to weaken him, so that when the strain comes there is no resistance, no reserve. He snaps like a sapped reed.... The tears rolled down Milly's face, and Reinhard looked away. He said nothing, and for the first time Milly thought him hard and unsympathetic. When the car drew up before his door, he helped her down and silently led the way to the darkened room on the floor above, then left her alone with her dead husband. * * * * * When a woman looks on the face of her dead comrade, it should not be altogether sad. Something of the joy and the tenderness of their intimacy should rise then to temper the sharpness of her grief. It was not so with Milly. It was wholly horrible to plunge thus, as it were, from the blinding light of the full summer day into the gloom of death. Her husband's face seemed shrunken and pallid, but curiously youthful. Into it had crept again something of that boyish confidence--the joyous swagger of youth--which he had when they sat in the Chicago beer-garden. It startled Milly, who had not recalled those days for a long time. Underneath his mustache the upper lip was twisted as if in pain, and the sunken eyes were mercifully closed. He had gone back to his youth, the happy time of strength and hope when he had expected to be a painter.... Milly fell on her knees by his side and sobbed without restraint. Yet her grief was less for him than for herself,--rather, perhaps, for them both. Somehow they had missed the beautiful dream they had dreamed together eight years before in the beer-garden. She realized bitterly that their married life, which should have been so wonderful, had come to the petty reality of these latter days. So she sobbed and sobbed, her head buried on the pillow beside his still head--grieved for him, for herself, for life. And the dead man lay there on the white bed, in the dim light, with his closed eyes, that mirage of recovered youth haunting his pale cheeks.