I must see Gertrude to-morrow in good time and acquaint her with my desire to run over to Florence before we are married and look up Biagi’s new material bearing upon the blessed old heathen, Brunetto Latini. Since Gertrude desires me to be great and famous, she cannot deny me the opportunity to discover how a great and famous man accomplished the trick. Besides, what has been delayed three years can surely support a further delay of three months. But, good heavens! What is this? Voices—the scuffling of feet in the hallway—what army is invading me at this hour! I believe I hear children’s voices—and a scream from Griselda, who has never screamed in her life! *CHAPTER III* Laura—my dear sister Laura—is dead! Her children are with me! Without warning she dropped suddenly under her burdens and with her dying breath confided her children to me—me! That one cataclysmic fact has taken its abode in my brain and numbed it as well as all my nerves to a chill and deadly paralysis that excludes everything else. It still seems wholly unbelievable—some nightmare from which I shall awake with a vast sickly sort of relief to the old custom of my tranquil life. The turbulence and the pain of the last three days, however, are still lashing about me like the angry waves after a tempest, in a manner too realistic for any dream. I am broad awake now, I know, and for hours I have been blankly staring into a very abyss of darkness. What will happen or what I shall do next, I haven’t the shadow of an idea. Laura is dead and her children are with me, and I am their guardian and sole reliance. Who could have forecast such a fate or such a rôle for me? Three days! It is incredible! Only three days ago, I was languidly protesting because I could not take ship forthwith for Italy to examine some manuscript at the Laurentian in Florence! No, by heavens! It was not I. It was some one else—some one I knew vaguely, in a past age, a man to be envied, serene and cheerful, blest of life, whom I shall never meet again. The last three days! I cannot banish them and yet I cannot meet the memory of them. Was it I who faced the tragedy, or was it some one else? Nothing surely is more tragic than a young mother’s death—and that young mother my own sister! Who was it that stonily passed through the ordeal of the "arrangements" and the black pantomime of the sepulture? I cannot record it even for myself, for never, I know, shall I desire to be reminded of it. At the death of my mother, I still had Laura with her practical woman’s sense. But now I was alone. I say now because however remote it seems, this tragedy will always be present. My life must forever remain under its stupefying spell. It is not credible that only three days ago I sat here in my study revolving trifles, those many shining trifles that went to make up my former life.