It seemed to him as if the life still left in her were one pure flame of love, undimmed by any thought of self, undisturbed by any breath of pain.

Oh, this victory of the spirit over the flesh, of soul over body, which humanity achieves and renews from day to day and from age to age, in all those nobler and finer personalities upon whom the moral life of the world depends! How it burns its testimony into the heart of the spectator! How it makes him thrill with the apprehension which lies at the root of all religion--the apprehension of an ideal order--the divine suspicion 'That we are greater than we know!' How it impresses itself upon us as the only miracle which will bear our leaning upon, and stand the strain of human questioning! It was borne in upon Eustace, as he sat bowed beside his dying sister, that through this fragile body and this failing breath the Eternal Mind was speaking, and that in Marie's love the Eternal Love was taking voice.

He said so to her brokenly, and her sweet eyes smiled back upon him a divine answer of peace and faith.
Then she called faintly, 'Paul!' The distant figure came back; and she laid her head upon her husband's breast, while Eustace was gently drawn away by the nurse.

Presently, he found himself mechanically taking food and mechanically listening to the low-voiced talk of the kindly white-capped woman who was attending to him.

Every fact, every impression, was misery,--these details so unexpected, so irrevocable, so charged with terrible meaning, which the nurse was pouring out upon him,--that presence in the neighbouring room of which his every nerve was conscious,--and in front of him, like a frowning barrier shutting off the view of the future, the advancing horror of death! Yesterday, at the same time, he had been walking along the sandy Surrey roads, delighting in the last autumn harmonies of colour, and conscious of the dawn of a period of rest after a period of conflict, of the growth within him of a temper of quiet and rational resignation to the conditions of life and of his own individual lot, over the development of which the mere fact of his sister's existence had exercised a strong and steadying influence.