The house was an ancient mansion on an old street in that city of culture
which has given to the history of our nation--to education, to religion,
to the sciences, and to the arts--so many illustrious names.

In the changing years, before the beginning of my story, the woman's
immediate friends and associates had moved from the neighborhood to the
newer and more fashionable districts of a younger generation. In that city
of her father's there were few of her old companions left. There were
fewer who remembered. The distinguished leaders in the world of art and
letters, whose voices had been so often heard within the walls of her
home, had, one by one, passed on; leaving their works and their names to
their children. The children, in the greedy rush of these younger times,
had too readily forgotten the woman who, to the culture and genius of a
passing day, had been hostess and friend.

The apartment was pitifully bare and empty. Ruthlessly it had been
stripped of its treasures of art and its proud luxuries. But, even in its
naked necessities the room managed, still, to evidence the rare
intelligence and the exquisite refinement of its dying tenant.

The face upon the pillow, so wasted by sickness, was marked by the
death-gray. The eyes, deep in their hollows between the fleshless forehead
and the prominent cheek-bones, were closed; the lips were livid; the nose
was sharp and pinched; the colorless cheeks were sunken; but the outlines
were still delicately drawn and the proportions nobly fashioned. It was,
still, the face of a gentlewoman. In the ashen lips, only, was there a
sign of life; and they trembled and fluttered in their effort to utter the
words that an indomitable spirit gave them to speak.