How long and graceful he looked in death! How gaunt and tired! All the striving, the brave pretending, the famished yearning which he had disguised showed plainly now. A smile hung about the corners of his mouth—a little mocking perhaps, yet tender. A bruise was on his forehead. He had the look of one who, having been puzzled, understood life at last and was content.
Peter felt that he had intruded. He had no right to stay there. Those bowed heads reproached him. He felt what men often feel when death is present: the body had been put out to usury; at the end of the trafficking it belonged to women, as it had belonged to a woman before the trafficking commenced.
He wandered out into the garden. Twilight weakened into darkness. His feet were always coming back to the window; he stood beneath it, looking up to where she knelt. If it were only for a moment, surely she would come to him. Again he entered. No stir of life in the house. He peered into the bedroom. She had not moved since he left.
Beyond her was the door which led into the Faun Man’s study. Noiselessly he stole across to it and raised the latch.
The room was in darkness. Set against the open window was a desk. Moonlight drifted in on it. A chair was pushed back from it. A pen lay carelessly on the blotting-pad, waiting for the master to return. Here it was possible to believe that the mind still lived and worked.
A movement! He stretched out his hand. Someone rose. Into the shaft of moonlight came the face of a man. “Oh—oh, it’s you, Harry!”
He struck a match and lit the lamp. They talked softly, in short whispered sentences. On the floor, on tables, on chairs, books and manuscripts lay scattered. The breeze blowing in at the window turned pages, as though an invisible person were searching. A sheet of paper, lying uppermost on the desk, fluttered across the room to where Harry sat. He stooped, picked it up, ran his eye over it and handed it to Peter. “The last thing he wrote. Thinking of her to the end.”
Peter took it and read,
“She came to me and the world was glad—
‘Twas winter, but hedges leapt white with May;