She stretched herself suddenly on the bed with her face in the old coat, the chill of the room slowly seizing upon her as she lay. She prayed in a distant, half-conscious way, without the least illusion that such words could persuade any one, for God to unmake everything that had happened to her, to let her have died, and Dorastus too, at his very birth; for them to have both been lying in the remote Dutch God's-acre these many years. For one fleeting moment memory gave back to her perfect an impression never before recalled. She seemed to have been roused from a stupor deeper than sleep; her eyes dwelt without wonder on what she thought to be a cathedral, with colored windows ablaze--it dwindled, until it was a mere night-light glimmering. Then shadowy people placed a little bundle in her arms. She tingled as an instrument whose every string is touched, a coolness rippled from her head to her feet, she knew a state never known before or since, a sense of unlimited wealth, a tenderness ineffable, a trembling outgoing of all her being to this handful of life. She heaved a great, faint sigh, and with effort unspeakable bent till her lips were pressed as to a warm rose-leaf. She sank to sleep, weak unto death, but blissfully happy--waking stronger and in a different mood. She wished she might not have waked, but been buried with her poor first baby in her arms, having ceased to be in the single moment wherein she completely loved it. Nothing that had happened to her since then seemed to her sweet; all was sicklied through by the consciousness of a crime gone before and daily confirmed, a woman's most monstrous, miserable crime--not loving enough. Nothing could make her withered, yellowed, cheapened life right now--she should have died at that moment. She said this over and over again to the powers that hear us, until all meaning had faded from it. She started, with a sense of something going out--she thought it must be the candle and she should be left in the dark. She sat up, frightened and freezing. The candle was burning quietly. Then, as she scrutinized the shadows ahead, loath to stir, she became aware of her rings having grown loose, they were in danger of dropping off; of her clothes having grown loose, they let the cold in under them; she felt a prickling at the temples, as if it were the gray creeping through her hair; she felt her features becoming pinched and old, beauty dropping from them like a husk. She wanted to cry then with a childish self-pity, but no tears would come; she did not know how to start the flood that she longed for to relieve her. She felt that she could only have screamed. She got up to rid herself of this congealment, and paced the room from corner to corner with sweeping black gown that told of the dusty things it had that day brushed.