Friedrich Othmar had had these two lines carved upon her tomb; they told of all the brevity of her life, but not of all its sadness. Had any living creature ever guessed all that?
A chill passed over Othmar as the doubts came to him. Had she suffered much more than he had ever thought? He had been caught then on the strong cyclone of a great passion, and been blinded by its rush and force.
The silence of the large chamber seemed filled with one long sigh.
The dog looked at him always, as though saying: 'I have not forgotten: once she lived; where is she now?'
Ah, where!
He rose oppressed by new and painful thoughts, and moved from one object to another in the room, as though each of them would tell him something he had yet to learn. He touched with a reverent hand this thing and that which had belonged to her, and which survived unharmed, unworn, and would so last for centuries if his descendants spared them; frail toys and trifles, yet dowered with a power of endurance denied to the human life, which there had passed away like a cloud of the morning.
He took up her ivory tablets with the engagements of the day still written in pencil on them; he touched her long thin gloves, her tall tortoiseshell-tipped garden cane, her writing-case with its monogram in silver. The things moved his heart strongly for the first time in seven years: it had been no fault of hers that she had been powerless to gain love from him.
One by one he drew open the drawers of the buhl-table on which these, her writing things, had all been left unmoved: in one he saw a little book covered with vellum, and closed with a silver pencil as a gate is closed with a staple. He hesitated a moment; then he drew the pencil out and opened the book. It was half filled with those poor timid little verses of which Nadine Napraxine had once by a chance jest suggested the existence, and for which the child had blushed as for a sin. They were faint, blurred, often half effaced, purposelessly, as by a shy uncertain hand afraid of its own creations, but some were legible. He read them, and all the soul left in them spoke to his.
All the thoughts and fears and sorrows, all the longing and the doubt and the hesitation which she had been too timid and too proud to ever show in life, were spoken to him in those tender and imperfect poems. They were simple as a daisy, spontaneous as a wood-lark's song; they were ignorant of all laws of science or rules of spondee and of dactyl; but, all halting and shy though they were, they had all the truth of a human heart in them. They were deep and wide enough to hold the secret which she had shut in them.