Joe started to protest, but Enoch continued:
“A hermit, who prefers his own companionship to that of friends—but if you knew how little the opinions of others affect me. I have long ago ceased to care for other people’s opinions. I have learned something in my life, lonely as it has been—and that is tolerance. Be tolerant, Joe; tolerant of every one—of even the ignorance, the vindictiveness of others. Perhaps even you think I am hard-hearted”—and before Joe could interrupt him: “You see me dry-eyed, and yet you have no idea what her death means to me. She did not suffer, even when the end came. I am grateful for that.”
He paused again, seeming to lapse into a revery, his chin sunk deep between his hands.
“Could nothing be done?” ventured Joe.
Enoch slowly shook his head.
“Only a miracle would have accomplished that,” said he.
“Might I ask where Mrs. Crane died?”
“At Ravenswood, at my old friend Doctor Brixton’s sanatorium, where she had been for nearly five years.”
“And you say you thought she recognized you?”
“Yes—for that brief instant I did; so did Brixton and the nurse—a certain look in her eyes, an old, familiar gesture of the hands; it was only a flash before the light went out,” he repeated. “She was dying then; I tried to force her to speak my name, but it was useless, Joe. She was conscious but very weak. I tried to force her to continue her train of thought, in what I believed was a brief awakening. She looked at me blankly as I held her hands, and murmured faintly: ‘Why have you come again, doctor?’ Presently she added, almost inaudibly, ‘You have not thanked me for the roses’—and then, after a moment, ‘I have hidden them again—I shall hide them always’—she ceased speaking. Before I could summon Brixton she was dead.”