2
She looked about her strangely, with bewildered eyes, with hands locked together:
“Go, go....” she repeated, like one raving.
Then she noticed the roses. With something like a faint scream she sank down before the little table and buried her face in his gift, until the thorns wounded her face. The pain—two drops of blood which fell from her forehead—brought her back to her senses. Standing before the Venetian mirror hanging over her writing-table, she wiped away the red spots with her handkerchief.
“Happiness!” she stammered to herself. “His happiness! The highest thing in his life! So he knew happiness, though short it was. But now ... now he suffers, now he will suffer again, as he did before. The remembrance of happiness cannot do everything. Ah, if it could only do that, then everything would be well, everything!... I wish for nothing more, I have had my life, my own life, my own happiness; I now have my children; I now belong to them. To him I must no longer be anything....”
She turned away from the mirror and sat down on the settee, as though tired with a great space traversed, and she closed her eyes, as though blinded with too great a light. She folded her hands together, like one in prayer; her face beamed in its fatigue, from smile to smile.
“Happiness!” she repeated, faltering between her smiles. “The highest thing in his life! O my God, happiness! I thank Thee, O God, I thank Thee!...”
THE END