She gleaned from his look and from the way he took her two hands in his that he had serious news to bring her. She had not been awake long enough to read the papers, and this was her first death. She cried helplessly when she learned that her husband was gone away with all her bitterness for his farewell. She remembered the best of him, and he came back to her for a while as the poet who had made her his muse--the only one she could telegraph to when she returned to New York alone, her first and only husband. She was afraid that she belittled herself in Dyckman's eyes when she let slip the remorseful Wail, “I wish I had been kinder to the poor boy!” But she did not belittle herself in any such tendernesses of regret. She endeared herself by her grief, her self-reproach, her childish humility before the power of death. Her tears were beautiful in Jim's sight. But it is the blessing and the shame of tears that they cure the grief that causes them. At first they bleed and burn; then they flow soft and cool. They cleanse and brighten the eyes and even wash away the cinders from the funeral smoke. Dyckman's heart was drawn out of him toward Kedzie and his arms held her shaken body devotedly. But at length she ceased to weep, and a last long sob became dangerously like a sigh of relief. She smiled through the rain and apologized for weeping, when she should have apologized for stopping weeping. Then Dyckman's love of her seemed to withdraw backward into his heart. And his arms suddenly wearied of clasping her. When she had seemed hardly to know that he was there he felt necessary and justified. When she took comfort in his arms and held them about her he felt ashamed, revolted, profane. Mrs. Thropp had wept a little in sympathy with Kedzie, and Adna had looked amiably disconsolate; but by and by Mrs. Thropp was murmuring: “After all, perhaps it was for the best. The Lord's will be done!” Dyckman shrank as if a blasphemy had been shouted. In a hideously short time Mrs. Thropp was saying, briskly: “Of course, honey, you've got no idea of puttin' on black for him.” “If I believed in mourning, I would,” Kedzie answered without delay, “but the true mourning is in the heart.” Dyckman felt an almost uncontrollable desire to get away before he said something that might be true. He began to wonder what, after all, poor Gilfoyle had experienced from this hard-hearted little beauty. He saw that he was almost forgotten already. He thought, “How fast they go, the dead!” That same Villon had said it centuries before: “_Les morts vont vites_.” The Thropps settled down to a comfortable discussion of future plans. One ledger had been finished. They would open a new one. Jim saw that Gilfoyle's departure had been accepted as a Heaven-sent solution of Kedzie's problems.