in her hand. Her dark hair, like the hair of a Japanese, had come
down and covered her body and her face.

Leonora lifted her up--she was the merest featherweight--and laid
her on the bed with her hair about her. She was smiling, as if she
had just scored a goal in a hockey match. You understand she had
not committed suicide. Her heart had just stopped. I saw her, with
the long lashes on the cheeks, with the smile about the lips, with
the flowers all about her. The stem of a white lily rested in her
hand so that the spike of flowers was upon her shoulder. She
looked like a bride in the sunlight of the mortuary candles that
were all about her, and the white coifs of the two nuns that knelt at
her feet with their faces hidden might have been two swans that
were to bear her away to kissing-kindness land, or wherever it is.
Leonora showed her to me. She would not let either of the others
see her. She wanted, you know, to spare poor dear Edward's
feelings. He never could bear the sight of a corpse. And, since she
never gave him an idea that Maisie had written to her, he
imagined that the death had been the most natural thing in the
world. He soon got over it. Indeed, it was the one affair of his
about which he never felt much remorse.

PART II

I

THE death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of August, 1904.
And then nothing happened until the 4th of August, 1913. There is
the curious coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether that is
one of those sinister, as if half jocular and altogether merciless