behind his wife's coffin.

At the present time as I finish this story, he is sitting in my
drawing-room and, playing on the piano, is showing the ladies how
provincial misses sing sentimental songs. The ladies are laughing,
and he is laughing too. He is enjoying himself.

I call him into my study. Evidently not pleased at my taking him
from agreeable company, he comes to me and stands before me in the
attitude of a man who has no time to spare. I give him this story,
and ask him to read it. Always condescending about my authorship,
he stifles a sigh, the sigh of a lazy reader, sits down in an
armchair and begins upon it.

"Hang it all, what horrors," he mutters with a smile.

But the further he gets into the reading, the graver his face
becomes. At last, under the stress of painful memories, he turns
terribly pale, he gets up and goes on reading as he stands. When
he has finished he begins pacing from corner to corner.

"How does it end?" I ask him.

"How does it end? H'm. . . ."

He looks at the room, at me, at himself. . . . He sees his new
fashionable suit, hears the ladies laughing and . . . sinking on a
chair, begins laughing as he laughed on that night.

"Wasn't I right when I told you it was all absurd? My God! I have