She heard a step on the gravel beneath her open window. She sprang to
her feet, the blood rushing to her hair. She ran to the window and
leaned out, smiling and trembling. Hedworth's eyes flashed upward to
hers. She was, it must be admitted, a product of that undulating and
alluring plain we call "the world," not of those heights where the few
who have scaled them live alone.




VIII

Death and the Woman.

(This story first appeared in _Vanity Fair_, London, in 1892)


Her husband was dying, and she was alone with him. Nothing could exceed
the desolation of her surroundings. She and the man who was going from
her were in the third-floor-back of a New York boarding-house. It was
summer, and the other boarders were in the country; all the servants
except the cook had been dismissed, and she, when not working, slept
profoundly on the fifth floor. The landlady also was out of town on a
brief holiday.

The window was open to admit the thick unstirring air; no sound rose
from the row of long narrow yards, nor from the tall deep houses
annexed. The latter deadened the rattle of the streets. At intervals the
distant elevated lumbered protestingly along, its grunts and screams
muffled by the hot suspended ocean.