It was Ernestine—but the three years had done much.
Older—greater—a more steady flame—a more conscious power—grief transmuted to understanding—despair risen to resolution—she had gone a long way. He looked at her in silence—reading, understanding. It was all written there—the story of deep thinking and deeper loving, of battles and victories, and other battles yet to fight, the poise which attends the victor—yes, she had gone a long way. And as she spoke his name, and smiled a little, and then could not repress the tears which his presence, all that it meant, brought, he saw, shining through her tears, that light of love's own days.
She turned and walked to the other side of the room, and he knew that she was taking him to the picture.
She watched his face as he took it in, and she knew then that she had done her work.
For a long time he said nothing, and when at last he turned to her, eyes dim, voice husky, it was only to say: "I can say—nothing. There are—no words."
He turned back to the picture, she standing silent beside him, reading in his face that with each moment he was coming into more perfect understanding.
For she had painted Karl's face as it was just before he went into the silence. She had caught the look which illumined his face that day on his death bed when she told him what she had done. She had painted Karl as he was in that moment of perfect understanding—the joy which was uplift, the knowledge which was glory. She had perpetuated in her picture the things which Karl took with him from life. It was Karl in the supreme moment of his life—the moment of revelation, transfiguration, the moment which lighted all the years.
It was triumph which she had perpetuated in the picture. She was saying to the world—He did not achieve what he set out to achieve, but can you say he failed when he left the world with a soul like this?
He saw that it was what she had done with light which made the picture, from the standpoint of her art, supreme. The critics said that no one had ever done just that thing with light before—painted light in just that spirit of loving and understanding it; less light, indeed, than light's significance. They said that no one before had painted the kind of light which could make a blind man see. For he was blind—the picture told that, but it seemed no one had ever had light quite as understandingly as he had it there.
"You feel it, doctor?" she asked at last, timidly. "You see it all?"