BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD. The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow because it contained the right number of letters required to fit in at the bottom. But did it fit in, Patrine had sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the close of her father’s life? She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the tinted presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon regiment. It had fallen to her keeping when her mother had re-married. But she cherished no illusions regarding the original. How often, since her own eyes had been opened to the fact of their existence, had she not screened David’s vices from strangers’ eyes. She had made him her ideal, and Mildred had revealed him to her as vicious, unprincipled. She could not forgive her mother for telling her those horrors, she, Mildred—seemed to forget whenever she was pleased. But Patrine had never forgotten. She would wake at night even now with the dry sobs shaking her.... To have been able to believe in that dead father as noble, chivalrous, good, would have been so sweet; she had shed big surreptitious tears in sympathy with the anguish of Jammes, who would have so loved to believe in the existence of Almighty God, and the dear little Jesus, the Blessed Virgin, and the holy Angels, because Faith is so restful, _si paisible_.... *CHAPTER XV* *THE BITE IN THE KISS* But von Herrnung was saying, as they moved with a straggling procession of similar pleasure-seekers, over smooth sanded pathways between beds of geranium and verbena and lobelia, ivy-leaved geranium and gaily coloured foliage-plants, bordered with little twinkling lamps: "Shall I tell you what I have just heard as those people passed us? The tall man with the white moustache, and the chic little woman in the Spanish _mantilla_. She told her friend that we make a handsome couple. Perhaps that makes you a little angry? ... Shall I make you still more angry? Well then, listen? ... If we were really a couple you would not have that so-black hair...." "Why not?" He had roused her curiosity. She put away the little damp, laced handkerchief. "Would your cruel usage of me have turned it white?" "Not that, but you would have added the one touch that makes perfection. You are too sombre—too much like a night in October with all that cloudy blackness.... You would have bleached and dyed your hair—not yellow, nor yet orange—nor even flame.... The colour of beech-leaves in winter, as one sees them burning against a snow-bank. And—all the women would be crazy with jealousy—and all the men would be dying at your feet! For you would be Isis then—you would be the Sphinx-woman of whom La Forgue wrote and Colette has sung to us. You would be hellishly, divinely beautiful!"