Rising suddenly she threw up the window and looked out into the night. A gust of cold wind and rain blew into her face. She faced it a moment, then, shutting down the window and dropping the crimson curtains together, passed into her sleeping apartment. But she could not rest. Her downy pillows might have been a bed of thorns. She rose, and gliding across the floor and, pausing one moment in grave irresolution, put her hand on the sliding door of the adjoining nursery, pushed it open and entered by the light that streamed from her own apartment. All was still and silent here. Shadows lay on everything as heavy as those that clouded her life. She stood gazing mutely around her for an instant; then, with a low, smothered sob of agony, rushed forward, and pushing up the sweeping Valenciennes canopy of the rosewood crib that stood in the center of the room, buried her face in the small pillow that still held the impress of a baby's head. Then silence fell. Some women carry beneath a calm, perhaps smiling, face, a deeper pain than was ever clothed in words or tears. The acme of human suffering crushes, paralyzes some hearts into terrible silence. It was thus with Grace. Her sorrow had sunk to the bottom of the sea of anguish, so deep that not a ripple on the surface, not a sparkling drop, leaped up to show where it fell. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes went by. She lifted her face at last--as white and chill as that of the dead, but lighted by "Melancholy eyes divine, The home of woe without a tear." She comes to this room as to a grave. Over the grave of the child of her heart she may never kneel. She fancies it in her mind sometimes away off under foreign skies, lying in the shadow of some frowning English church, with not a flower on its low mound, unless Nature, more loving than cold humanity, has dropped it there like a jewel in the grass. She sees the sunshine lying on it in the quiet days, hears the birds--the only thing that ever sings in a graveyard--warbling matin songs and vesper hymns in the ivy that clings to the imaginary old church. _There_ she may never kneel--here are gathered all her simple mementoes of him-- "Playthings upon the carpet, And dainty little shoes-- With snow-white caps and dresses That seem too fair to use." There is the crib where she has watched his rosy slumbers; there in the corner is the little bathing-tub where she has seen the dimpled struggling limbs flashing through the diamond spray of cold water, like polished marbles; there upon the wall, smiling down at her in its infantile beauty and joy, hangs the pictured semblance of the face that her foreboding heart whispers to her is moldering into kindred dust beneath the coffin-lid. This room is to her alike a shrine and a grave. How it rains!