disappeared. His consciousness accepted nothing but the cameo profile
of marble white, the nimbus of golden haze about the head, the
mist-like suggestion of a body, and again the clear marble spot of the
hands. All else was a background of modulated depths.

So gradually the old man's spirit, wearied by the stress of the last
hour, turned in on itself and began to create. The cameo profile, the
mist-like body, the marble hands remained; but now Galen Albret saw
other things as well. A dim, rare perfume was wafted from some unseen
space; indistinct flashes of light spotted the darknesses; faint
swells of music lifted the silence intermittently. These things were
small and still, and under the external consciousness--like the voices
one may hear beneath the roar of a tumbling rapid--but gradually they
defined themselves. The perfume came to Galen Albret's nostrils on the
wings of incensed smoke; the flashes of light steadied to the ovals of
candle flames; the faint swells of music blended into grand-breathed
organ chords. He felt about him the dim awe of the church, he saw the
tapers burning at head and foot, the clear, calm face of the dead,
smiling faintly that at last it should be no more disturbed. So had he
looked all one night and all one day in the long time ago. The Factor
stretched his arms out to the figure on the couch, but he called upon
his wife, gone these twenty years.

"Elodie! Elodie!" he murmured, softly.

She had never known it, thank God, but he had wronged her too. In all
sorrow and sweet heavenly pity he had believed that her youth had
turned to the youth of the other man. It had not been so. Did he not
owe her, too, some reparation?