“She can no longer see it, Jorge,” said Julião, deeply moved.
Jorge drew his hand from Julião’s clasp and threw himself on Luiza’s body; he caught her head between his hands, gazed at it a moment with exquisite tenderness, then kissed her cold lips twice, murmuring, “Good-by, good-by!”
He rose to his feet, extended his arms, and fell to the floor, senseless. They hastened to him, lifted him up, and laid him on the sofa. And while Donna Felicidade, drowned in tears, closed Luiza’s eyes, the counsellor, his hat still in his hand, folded his arms, and shaking his respectable bald head, said to Sebastião,—
“What a terrible misfortune for our Jorge!”
CHAPTER XXV.
AND SO THE WORLD GOES ON.
AFTER Luiza’s funeral Jorge dismissed the servants, and went himself to stay with Sebastião. At about nine o’clock in the evening of the same day the Counsellor Accacio was walking disconsolately by the Moinho de Vento, when he encountered Julião, who had just come from visiting a patient in the Rua da Rosa. They walked on together, conversing about Luiza, the funeral, and Jorge’s grief.
“Poor fellow! It is a terrible blow to him,” said Julião, compassionately.
“She was a model wife!” murmured the counsellor.
He had just come, he said, from Sebastião’s, but he had not been able to see his dear Jorge, who had thrown himself upon the bed and fallen into a profound sleep. And he added,—
“I have been lately reading that intense suffering is apt to be followed by profound sleep. Thus it was with Napoleon, for instance, after Waterloo,—the great disaster of Waterloo.” And after a moment’s silence he continued,—