“How men forget! To—put it in the paper.”
He turned on her angrily.
“This is unlike you—even you. This is too ridiculously, wickedly morbid.”
“Isn’t it? But—but you promise just the same.”
“Yes, anything—if you’ll go up at once and change your shoes,” he returned a little moodily, and kissing her with habitual carelessness on the hot lips she held up.
She ran through the gate. He heard her humming lightly as she went upstairs. He picked up baby Betty with a sigh, and swung her on his back, feeling grateful that she at least had no complex emotions. A sugar-stick would bare her little simple soul.
*****
A week later Adeline died. The cold she caught under the elms developed into pneumonia. She was a creature all nerves and no muscle. I know that her conscience killed her. She was dead. Dead in the June days, which had suddenly turned hot and yellow. Dead! lying rigid under the brooding thatch eaves where the birds built. Lying cold and unresponsive to birds, flowers, sun, love—all the things which had moved her to hot, mournful passion. Almost her last words were, “Life has been lovely, lovely.” Then with a little haunting flicker of anxiety, memory, and fear on that face which already seemed to belong to some other world, she added faintly, “You’ll put it in the paper?”
James Pray, broken-hearted, sent off the notice. It had been only a freak, of course; one of the whimsical, morbid ideas which she had in such plenty. But it was sacred. It was such a hideously little while since the afternoon under the elms. She had looked so haggardly beautiful. He remembered everything—down to a green caterpillar which crawled on her hair.
Next day he walked into the village and bought a copy of the newspaper, and brought it home and spread it out on the oak table in front of him.