Such passionate rebellion filled him that he would walk for hours about the country, while merciful anesthetics gave her oblivion, in a blind rage of mere feeling--feeling at a white heat, a core of tormented life. And the worst was that her life of martyrdom was not to be crowned by a martyr’s happy death; the worst was that her own light died away from before her feet, that she groped in darkness, and that, since he was to lose her, he might not even have her to the end. For months he watched the slow fading of all that had made her herself, her relapse into the instinctive, almost into the animal. Her lips, for many days, kept the courage of their smile, but it was at last only an automatic courage, showing no sweetness, no caress. Her eyes, in the first tragic joy of their reunion, had longed, grieved, yearned over the son who hid his sorrow for her sake. Afterward, all feeling, except a sort of chill resentment, died from her look. For the last days of her life, when, in great anguish, she never spoke at all, these eyes would turn on him with a strange immensity of indifference. It was as if already his mother were gone and as if a ghost had stolen into his life. She died at last, after a long night of unconsciousness, without a word or look that brought them near. Gavan lived through all that followed in a stupor. On the day of her funeral, when all was over, he walked out into the spring woods. The day was sweet and mild. Pools of shallow water shone here and there in the hollows, among the slender tree-stems. Pale slips of blue were seen among the fine, gray branches, and pushing up from last year’s leaves were snowdrops growing everywhere, white and green among the russet leaves, lovely, lovely snowdrops. Seeing them, in his swift, aimless wandering, Gavan paused. The long nights and days had worn him to that last stage of exhaustion where every sense is stretched fine and sharp as the highest string of a musical instrument. Leaning against a tree, his arms folded, he looked at the snowdrops, at their vivid green, and their white, as fresh, as delicate as flakes of newly fallen snow. “Lovely, lovely,” he said, and, looking all about him, at the fretwork of gray branches on the blue, the pale, shining water,--a little bird just hopping to its edge among the shorter grass to drink,--he repeated, “Lovely,” while the anguish in his heart and the sweet beauty without combined in the sharp, exquisite tension of a mood about to snap, the fineness of a note, unendurably high, held to an unendurable length.