The familiar room, the familiar figure, Guida saw them as in a glass darkly. She knew it was no use fighting. Something confronted her which was implacable by words or tears or prayers; implacable as death, yet wearing the bright face of life and love.
He was watching her, with infinite kindness, from that great and starry distance. “I didn’t do wrong to tell you, did I?” he asked gently. “There was more or less of an unspoken compact—we always talked out our philosophies. How thin they seem—now. . . . And I thought you wouldn’t—grieve—when it comes. . . If I could show you that grief was—would be—out of place.”
She bent her head and after a minute asked calmly, “when do you go?”
“This evening.” And afterwards she could remember no interval between his saying so and his rising to go. A few more brief sentences, broken words of courage that were on a thousand lips; then he was at the door, turning with a smile. She did not press him to stay. Life was going with him; but better it should go, she thought. She knew afterwards that he had held her hands, kissed her once, and blessed her for “the truest friend ever man had.” But all the time their souls were divided by a barrier of great and shining things in which she had no share.
“Good-bye, Guida.”
“No, Dick, no! Au ’voir!”
For a moment that light seemed to include her as she defied it, to shine on her too. Then it was gone with him, and the door closed.
She stayed quiet, as she was, for a long time; then she slid forward slowly to the floor and knelt there, her face in her hands. Later she rose, and went to a glass, and mercilessly examined her beauty.
“A little while, my dear,” she said, “a little while, and you’ll be old. And lonely. . . Would it have made any difference if you’d told Dick you loved him?”
“Would it have made it seem happier to Guida,” Dick Lewis was asking himself, “if I could have told her that I’ll be not only willing, but glad—eager—to go, for the sake of the one chance in a thousand that I’ll find that girl again—the girl whose name I never knew—the girl on the other side?”