It was an accident, perhaps. Yes, of course; it must have been an accident. He had not noticed…. For, as again she advanced, her eyes on his, his eyes on hers, again he retreated. And suddenly, in utter silence save for the rending of crumbling earth and uprooted grass, he slid over the edge of the great rock…. Before the eyes of the girl lay only the restless, heaving sea. and beyond the dull gray of the horizon and the cupped sky.
She turned, slowly, smiling a little. The shrivelled, shrunken old woman bent her head forward upon her flat breast, thrice.
"Bien," she muttered. And that was all.
[Illustration]
CHAPTER EIGHT.
OF CERTAIN GOINGS.
It so happened that, on the winter after Jack Schuyler and Tom Blake graduated from college, death came to the big houses on the Avenue. Mrs. John Stuyvesant Schuyler went first; Mrs. Thomas Cathcart Blake went, almost, with her; for she had been by the bedside of her friend during all her illness; and her friend, going, had bestowed upon her its horrible heritage. And so she went, too.
Their going left in the two great houses, monstrous voids that might never be filled. John Stuyvesant Schuyler and Thomas Cathcart Blake loved their wives; and when a man has loved a woman, and that woman his wife, as these two had loved, it seems in a way to disrupt the cosmogony of things. It takes ambition from the brain, and the stamina from the spine; and the days are very, very long, while the nights are yet infinitely longer.
Thomas Cathcart Blake, in the vastness of all that now was not, forgot to care for himself. He, who had been jovial, became silent. Some times, of nights, he would walk alone for hours. The weather made no difference—in fact, he seldom noticed what the weather was. He was an old man now, close to sixty….
Dr. DeLancey, on a night visit, met him one thick, sodden night at the corner of Thirty-third Street and the Avenue, coming from the club. The good doctor bumbled out of his brougham, seized him by the arm and drew him wet and dripping into its protected interior.